High-performance blockchain system for fast certification of manufacturing data

Integration of blockchain systems into industrial applications show promise in increasing security, trust, and transparency along the value-chain during product and process tracking. However, current solutions suffer performance deficiencies, or often disregard legacy devices still in operation. We propose a blockchain system built upon an IoT architecture that is secure, modular, easily scalable, and deployable for fast certification of manufacturing data, compatible with current industrial landscapes. First, the proposed architecture is presented along with elements required to manage network functions. Second, easing integration with existing manufacturing solutions, custom APIs are created and subsequently explained. This grants the platform plug-and-play capabilities, requiring minimal hardware and software configuration for deployment. Lastly, a prototype is designed to validate the solution, concluding the viability of the proposed architecture as a fast and secure certification method of manufacturing data.

IoT-Based Smart Management of Healthcare Services in Hospital Buildings during COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

The paper aims to design and develop an innovative solution in the Smart Building context that increases guests’ hospitality level during the COVID-19 and future pandemics in locations like hotels, conference locations, campuses, and hospitals. The solution supports features intending to control the number of occupants by online appointments, smart navigation, and queue management in the building through mobile phones and navigation to the desired location by highlighting interests and facilities. Moreover, checking the space occupancy, and automatic adjustment of the environmental features are the abilities that can be added to the proposed design in the future development. The proposed solution can address all mentioned issues regarding the smart building by integrating and utilizing various data sources collected by the internet of things (IoT) sensors. Then, storing and processing collected data in servers and finally sending the desired information to the end-users. Consequently, through the integration of multiple IoT technologies, a unique platform with minimal hardware usage and maximum adaptability for smart management of general and healthcare services in hospital buildings will be created.

Implementing virtual laboratories: Remote teaching of electrical machines

One of the fundamental requirements of engineering education is laboratory work and practical teaching. The main purpose of the laboratory is to provide a space for students to carry out practices that allow them to check the theory learned in the classroom, validate hypotheses, propose solutions and recommendations, develop critical thinking skills and develop soft skills. The provision of laboratory work to engineering students helps them familiarize themselves with similar situations as they will find real life as they practice their profession. Primarily, this laboratory work is based on actual hardware and a laboratory where the students can work at a specified time, perform experiments under the guidance of a lab technician and leave with data that they can analyze later using the knowledge they learned in class. These laboratories and the hardware equipment in them are expensive to acquire and maintain. Also, they are an expensive upgrade, yet upgrading is inevitable with the rapid change in technology we are all experiencing. Various institutions have been forced to use outdated laboratory hardware or do with minimal hardware for performing engineering experiments. However, the rapid increase in technology that is contributing to the problem can be used to solve it by having a suitable front-end design in computers that can be used to simulate experiments.

23Na MRI on 0,5T clinical scanner

Object. The purpose of this work is to reveal the possibilities of low-field 23Na MRI. It was supposed to obtain images of various human organs using the 3D-scanning method, and to do this with minimal hardware modifications of a typical clinical 0,5T scanner. Materials and methods. The proprietary receiving coils, originally intended for registering proton signals (21,1 MHz), were transformed to transceiver ones and tuned to the sodium Larmor frequency of 5,6 MHz. The scanning was carried out by the 3D-gradient echo method with the parameters: TR/TE=44,7/12 ms, FA=45° and isotropic resolution of 6 mm. To increase SNR, apodization in k-space was applied during data processing. Results. 23Na MRI (including volumetric reconstructions) of several human organs – head, breast, heart, joints were obtained with SNR up to 15. Discussion. When developing low-field 23Na MRI, it is advisable to focus on recording only the T2long component (>15 ms). In this case, it is possible to narrow the receiver bandwidth as much as possible and thereby minimize noise. In addition, the requirements for the transmission path are reduced. As a result, for debugging MRI methods, the equipment of a typical clinical scanner, which is supplemented by coils tuned to the sodium NMR frequency only, can be used.

CernVM-FS powered container hub

Containers became the de-facto standard to package and distribute modern applications and their dependencies. The HEP community demonstrates an increasing interest in such technology, with scientists encapsulating their analysis workflow and code inside a container image. The analysis is first validated on a small dataset and minimal hardware resources to then run at scale on the massive computing capacity provided by the grid. The typical approach for distributing containers consists of pulling their image from a remote registry and extracting it on the node where the container runtime (e.g., Docker, Singularity) runs. This approach, however, does not easily scale to large images and thousands of nodes. CVMFS has long been used for the efficient distribution of software directory trees at a global scale. In order to extend its optimized caching and network utilization to the distribution of containers, CVMFS recently implemented a dedicated container image ingestion service together with container runtime integrations. CVMFS ingestion is based on per-file deduplication, instead of the per-layer deduplication adopted by traditional container registries. On the client-side, CVMFS implements on-demand fetching of the chunks required for the execution of the container instead of the whole image.

New Approach in the Fault Tolerant Control of Three-Phase Inverter Fed Induction Motor

This article provides an improved fault-tolerant control scheme for inverter-powered induction motors. The proposed strategy addresses the cancellation of power switch failures (IGBTs) regardless of their location in a reconfigurable induction motor control. The proposed fault-tolerant topology requires only minimal hardware modifications of the conventional six-switch three-phase drive, mitigating IGBT failures through reconfiguration based on the substitution of an entire inverter arm. The detection mechanism is based on the tridimensional method from which a database will be used for the learning of the neural network. In this method, the current from the stator is used as input to the system, so access to the induction motor is not necessary.

AlphaTracker: A Multi-Animal Tracking and Behavioral Analysis Tool

The advancement of behavioral analysis in neuroscience has been aided by the development of computational tools1,2. Specifically, computer vision algorithms have emerged as a powerful tool to elevate behavioral research3,4. Yet fully automatic analysis of social behavior remains challenging in two ways. First, existing tools to track and analyze behavior often focus on single animals, not multiple, interacting animals. Second, many available tools are not developed for novice users and require programming experience to run. Here, we unveil a computer vision pipeline called AlphaTracker, which requires minimal hardware requirements and produces reliable tracking of multiple unmarked animals. An easy-to-use user interface further enables manual inspection and curation of results. We demonstrate the practical, real-time advantages of AlphaTracker through the study of multiple, socially-interacting mice.

PIMP My Many-Core: Pipeline-Integrated Message Passing

To improve the scalability, several many-core architectures use message passing instead of shared memory accesses for communication. Unfortunately, Direct Memory Access (DMA) transfers in a shared address space are usually used to emulate message passing, which entails a lot of overhead and thwarts the advantages of message passing. Recently proposed register-level message passing alternatives use special instructions to send the contents of a single register to another core. The reduced communication overhead and architectural simplicity lead to good many-core scalability. After investigating several other approaches in terms of hardware complexity and throughput overhead, we recommend a small instruction set extension to enable register-level message passing at minimal hardware costs and describe its integration into a classical five stage RISC-V pipeline.