Nikhil Jha - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Nikhil Jha

ACM Transactions on the Web

To protect user privacy, legislators have regulated the use of tracking technologies, mandating t... more To protect user privacy, legislators have regulated the use of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users’ consent before collecting data. As a result, websites started showing more and more consent management modules–i.e., Consent Banners–the visitors have to interact with to access the website content. Since these banners change the content the browser loads, they challenge web measurement collection, primarily to monitor the extent of tracking technologies, but also to measure web performance. If not correctly handled, Consent Banners prevent crawlers from observing the actual content of the websites. In this paper, we present a comprehensive measurement campaign focusing on popular websites in Europe and the US, visiting both landing and internal pages from different countries around the world. We engineer Priv-Accept , a Web crawler able to accept the Consent Banners, as most users would do in practice. It lets us compare how webpages change before and after acce...

2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)

With the advent of big data and the birth of the data markets that sell personal information, ind... more With the advent of big data and the birth of the data markets that sell personal information, individuals' privacy is of utmost importance. The classical response is anonymization, i.e., sanitizing the information that can directly or indirectly allow users' re-identification. The most popular solution in the literature is the k-anonymity. However, it is hard to achieve kanonymity on a continuous stream of data, as well as when the number of dimensions becomes high. In this paper, we propose a novel anonymization property called z-anonymity. Differently from k-anonymity, it can be achieved with zero-delay on data streams and it is well suited for high dimensional data. The idea at the base of z-anonymity is to release an attribute (an atomic information) about a user only if at least z − 1 other users have presented the same attribute in a past time window. z-anonymity is weaker than k-anonymity since it does not work on the combinations of attributes, but treats them individually. In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework to map the z-anonymity into the k-anonymity property. Our results show that a proper choice of the z-anonymity parameters allows the data curator to likely obtain a k-anonymized dataset, with a precisely measurable probability. We also evaluate a real use case, in which we consider the website visits of a population of users and show that z-anonymity can work in practice for obtaining the k-anonymity too.

Proceedings of Data Analytics and Management, 2022

Covid-19 is an increasingly growing infective virus which really infects humans that interacted w... more Covid-19 is an increasingly growing infective virus which really infects humans that interacted with it. Whilst these clinicians have mostly been infected with such a respiratory tract disease whenever they come in contact with both the disease, it was revealed in a clinical trial of COVID-19 treated persons that they had been mostly diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection when they made contact with the disease. A chest x-ray (also recognised as radiography) is a somewhat complicated imaging technique for detecting concerns in the respiratory system. Artificial intelligence is the most widely used accomplished machine learning algorithm for examining a substantial array of chest x-ray images, but it has the capacity to have a significant impact on Covid-19 testing. In this study, we have used PA interpret of x-rays tests both for covid-19 patients and safe individuals. We tested CNN templates and deep learning strategies. To review ResNeXt models and examine their performance ...

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2019

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become increasingly popular since their start in the yea... more Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become increasingly popular since their start in the year 2008. Universities known worldwide for their traditional confined classroom education are also changing their practices by hosting MOOCs. These are Internet-based courses where students can learn at their own pace and follow their own schedule. Study materials and videos are provided that can be used in a blended learning program. Despite its many advantages, it suffers from problems such as high dropout and failure rates. Previous studies have mostly focused on predicting student dropout. This paper contributes to the body of research by investigating both student dropout and result prediction performance of machine learning models built based on different types of attributes such as demographic info, assessment info and interaction with the VLE. An analysis on the OULAD dataset showed that models based on student's interaction with the VLE achieved the high performance in terms of AUC, of up to 0.91 for dropout prediction and 0.93 for result prediction in case of Gradient Boosting Machine.

The main objective of developing this system is to present an automated way to keep track of atte... more The main objective of developing this system is to present an automated way to keep track of attendance which would reduce the present pen and paper based manual method of marking attendance. Replacing the tedious old method this system will save time, reduce the amount of work the teachers has to do and will replace the stationery material with a computer based system. This system deals with the maintenance of the student's attendance details. It generates the attendance of the student on basis of presence in class. It is maintained on the daily basis of their attendance. The staffs will be provided with the separate username & password to make the student's presence. The staffs handling the particular subjects will be responsible to mark the attendance for all students. Only if the student present on that particular period, the attendance will be marked.

International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012

Network Slicing is one of the most promising possibilities that will be provided by 5G networks, ... more Network Slicing is one of the most promising possibilities that will be provided by 5G networks, allowing customer-specific services to run on a heterogeneous set of physical resources. In 5G, Bells Labs is aiming at the possibility of federating both 3GPP and non-3GPP resources, to create the infrastructure suited for Network Slicing. These resources must be organized and their coverage evaluated, solving two aspects: the problem of deduction (prediction of coverage interaction between resources starting from the relative positioning) and the problem of detection (estimation of resources’ signal quality). During the internship, a graph-based database has been built exploiting internal and external sources. Several techniques for both deduction and detection have been studied, among which the INF-score-based algorithm has been selected for deduction and the coverage radius estimation technique has been used to perform detection. A first baseline pipeline has been built to solve the ...

Cardiovascular dysfunction is a major cause of morbidity and mortally. As such, the characterizat... more Cardiovascular dysfunction is a major cause of morbidity and mortally. As such, the characterization of the heart and surrounding vessels has a high clinical significance. The advent of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has provided an effective and efficient, noninvasive method of looking at the cardiovascular system. This thesis investigates the application of MRI in the quantification of two particular aspects of the cardiovascular system: arterial blood flow and the left atrium (LA). The use of pulse wave velocity (PWV) in flow quantification is explored. The majority of prevalent techniques use landmarks in the time-domain to calculate PWV. However, this presents problems with reliability due to the low temporal resolution of MRI flow data. A frequency-domain based approach through the use of the Fourier transform is investigated. This method is shown to be effective in minimizing errors found in the time-domain calculations. Dual-contour propagation is a post-processing technique used to produce contours. This is done through the propagation of manually drawn end-diastole (ED) and end-systole (ES) contours throughout the cardiac cycle. The method has been previously validated in regards to its applicability for ventricular data. The application of this technique with LA MRI images is considered and shown to be a valid propagation method. Finally, different approaches to volumetric quantification of the LA are explored. Issues are raised with the accepted serial short-axis and area-length calculation methods and a new virtual short-axis method is proposed. This method seeks to compensate for the inaccurate geometric assumptions made by the area length method whilst avoiding the time intensive use of the short-axis in quantification. This method is shown to be effective and efficient method for volumetric analysis. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Thomas S. Denney Jr. From my time as an undergraduate, he has afforded me great opportunities through the Auburn University MRI Research Center. From his instruction on MATLAB to teaching me to use the MRI machines, he has made this work possible. His wisdom and insight have guided me in my work and helped me explore the field of cardiovascular MRI. His enthusiasm for the research has helped cultivate a profound fascination with the subject. Dr. Nouha Salibi has been both an invaluable resource and a constantly uplifting presence during my time at Auburn. Her comprehensive knowledge of MRI has helped me overcome many roadblocks. I would also like to thank my advisory committee: Dr. Gopikrishna Desphande and Dr.Stanley J. Reeves for their support in my thesis and my work.

Papers in Regional Science, 2021

Y2O3:Eu nanophosphors are prepared from different synthesis viz. Combustion synthesis, Precipitat... more Y2O3:Eu nanophosphors are prepared from different synthesis viz. Combustion synthesis, Precipitation Method, Sol-Gel. The samples are annealed from 600-14000C temperature. Effect of Temperature on luminescence intensity of Europium Doped Y2O3 phosphor prepared from different synthesisroutes is studied in the presented paper. Prepared samples are found to have monoclinic structure when compared with JCPDS standard data. The luminescence intensity increases with the increase of particle size and is affected by synthesis route. Eu doped Y2O3 particle shows sharp emission at 611nm at UV excitation. The samples are excited with different UV wavelength and maximum emission intensity is found when excited with 234nm wavelength. Powder X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) results indicated that high temperature leads to increase in the particle size. TEM photographs show the agglomeration of the samples at higher temperature.

Chocolate industry is among the most polluting of the food industries in regard to its large wate... more Chocolate industry is among the most polluting of the food industries in regard to its large water consumption. Chocolate is one of the major industries causing water pollution. Considering the increased milk demand, the Chocolate industry in India is expected to grow rapidly and have the waste generation and related environmental problems are also assumed increased importance. Poorly treated wastewater with high level of pollutants caused by poor design, operation or treatment systems creates major environmental problems when discharged to the surface land or water. Various operations in a Chocolate industry may include pasteurization, cream, cheese, milk powder etc. Considering the above stated implications an attempt has been made in the present project to evaluate one of the Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) for Chocolate waste. Samples are collected from three points; Collection tank (CT), outflow of Anaerobic Contact Filter (ACF) and Secondary clarifier (SC) to evaluate the perfo...

2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2021

As many robot automation applications increasingly rely on multi-core processing or deep-learning... more As many robot automation applications increasingly rely on multi-core processing or deep-learning models, cloud computing is becoming an attractive and economically viable resource for systems that do not contain high computing power onboard. Despite its immense computing capacity, it is often underused by the robotics and automation community due to lack of expertise in cloud computing and cloud-based infrastructure. Fog Robotics balances computing and data between cloud edge devices. We propose a software framework, FogROS, as an extension of the Robot Operating System (ROS), the defacto standard for creating robot automation applications and components. It allows researchers to deploy components of their software to the cloud with minimal effort, and correspondingly gain access to additional computing cores, GPUs, FPGAs, and TPUs, as well as predeployed software made available by other researchers. FogROS allows a researcher to specify which components of their software will be deployed to the cloud and to what type of computing hardware. We evaluate FogROS on 3 examples: (1) simultaneous localization and mapping (ORB-SLAM2), (2) Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) GPU-based grasp planning, and (3) multi-core motion planning using a 96core cloud-based server. In all three examples, a component is deployed to the cloud and accelerated with a small change in system launch configuration, while incurring additional latency of 1.2 s, 0.6 s, and 0.5 s due to network communication, the computation speed is improved by 2.6×, 6.0× and 34.2×, respectively. Code, videos, and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/ FogROS.

International Journal of Computer and Communication Technology, 2014

Effective storage utilization is the key concept for better working of any operating system. Even... more Effective storage utilization is the key concept for better working of any operating system. Even operating systems used for mobile phones are not an exception for this fact. This paper proposes a technique for maximizing the utilization of the storage space present in mobile phones. Thus it is important to utilize the space occupied by SMS files in phone’s memory, which take maximum space. The objective involved is designing a semantic dictionary based on Intelligent Dictionary Based Encoding (IDBE) which provides a high text compression ratio to utilize the space in phone’s memory. When SMS file will be received, English words present in the text will be replaced by the respective short words in the designed semantic dictionary. Thus replacing English words by the respective short forms reduces the space occupied by the SMS file. The paper describes the IDBE Compression Techniques for SMS Text Compression.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Education is often claimed to reduce social exclusion and crime, yet there is little empirical ev... more Education is often claimed to reduce social exclusion and crime, yet there is little empirical evidence beyond that for increased schooling. In this study, we estimate the crime-reducing effects of participating in post-secondary vocational education and training (VET) between ages 16 and 44, exploiting a natural experiment in Australia that increased VET participation in the state of Victoria, but not in the neighbouring state of New South Wales. Using postcode (zipcode) level administrative data and difference-indifferences estimation, we find that increased VET participation is associated with reduced person, drug and property crime. We find much larger effects for mature-age people (26-44) than for young people (16-25), possibly because crime at this age is more closely linked to legitimate labor market opportunities. These results provide plausibly causal evidence that extending opportunities for later-life education and training can have substantial public benefits.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

This study uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HI... more This study uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to provide a descriptive analysis of teacher careers in Australia, looking at transitions in and out of teaching, the length of spells spent teaching, remuneration and job satisfaction in both government and non-government school sectors. Each year, approximately 14 per cent of teachers leave teaching (becoming a principal is not counted as leaving teaching). Most who leave return to teaching at some stage, commonly after a gap of just one or two years. This absence from teaching is typically associated with starting a family. Overall, teachers are just as satisfied with their jobs as other professionals, and express aboveaverage levels of job satisfaction in relation to job security, but below average satisfaction in relation to job flexibility (i.e. work/life balance). Those who left teaching recorded substantially lower job satisfaction on all aspects of their job while teaching, which su gests they were no longer well suited to teaching. The starting wages of full-time teachers are similar to those of other full-time professions, but their wages grow much more slowly with experience than other professions, for both males and females.

Journal of Medical Science And clinical Research, 2018

Burkholderia cepacia is a group of highly virulent organisms known as Burkholderia cepacia comple... more Burkholderia cepacia is a group of highly virulent organisms known as Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc). Bcc are ubiquitous and most commonly found in moist places, on plant roots and soil. Because of its high intrinsic resistance to antibiotics, Bcc is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients.Usualy, It is reported in immunocompromised patients especially in patients with cystic fibrosis. Here, we report a rare case report of pneumonia by Burkholderia cepacia in an immunocompetent patient, who presented with fever and Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (MODS). Burkholderia cepacia was isolated from his sputum culture.

Empirical Economics, 2017

The federally-funded, HUD-administered Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was enacted in th... more The federally-funded, HUD-administered Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was enacted in the wake of the financial recession to mitigate the underlying adverse neighborhood effects associated with foreclosed properties. We examined the neighborhood price impacts of NSP-funded foreclosure rehabilitation undertaken by Habitat for Humanity in Dallas County, Texas using a difference-indifference framework. Foreclosure rehabilitation projects in Dallas County produced an average 15% increase in neighborhood home prices that sold up to 30 months after the rehabilitated property sale and within 0.1 miles of the rehabilitated property. Foreclosure rehabilitation that involved significant exterior repairs was associated with the largest estimated effect sizes. Results suggest that NSP-funding in Dallas County effectively targeted homes that had the potential to have the most severe neighborhood impacts, and that rehabilitation was an effective means of reversing neighborhood price externalities associated with blighted foreclosed properties.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

ACM Transactions on the Web

To protect user privacy, legislators have regulated the use of tracking technologies, mandating t... more To protect user privacy, legislators have regulated the use of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users’ consent before collecting data. As a result, websites started showing more and more consent management modules–i.e., Consent Banners–the visitors have to interact with to access the website content. Since these banners change the content the browser loads, they challenge web measurement collection, primarily to monitor the extent of tracking technologies, but also to measure web performance. If not correctly handled, Consent Banners prevent crawlers from observing the actual content of the websites. In this paper, we present a comprehensive measurement campaign focusing on popular websites in Europe and the US, visiting both landing and internal pages from different countries around the world. We engineer Priv-Accept , a Web crawler able to accept the Consent Banners, as most users would do in practice. It lets us compare how webpages change before and after acce...

2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)

With the advent of big data and the birth of the data markets that sell personal information, ind... more With the advent of big data and the birth of the data markets that sell personal information, individuals' privacy is of utmost importance. The classical response is anonymization, i.e., sanitizing the information that can directly or indirectly allow users' re-identification. The most popular solution in the literature is the k-anonymity. However, it is hard to achieve kanonymity on a continuous stream of data, as well as when the number of dimensions becomes high. In this paper, we propose a novel anonymization property called z-anonymity. Differently from k-anonymity, it can be achieved with zero-delay on data streams and it is well suited for high dimensional data. The idea at the base of z-anonymity is to release an attribute (an atomic information) about a user only if at least z − 1 other users have presented the same attribute in a past time window. z-anonymity is weaker than k-anonymity since it does not work on the combinations of attributes, but treats them individually. In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework to map the z-anonymity into the k-anonymity property. Our results show that a proper choice of the z-anonymity parameters allows the data curator to likely obtain a k-anonymized dataset, with a precisely measurable probability. We also evaluate a real use case, in which we consider the website visits of a population of users and show that z-anonymity can work in practice for obtaining the k-anonymity too.

Proceedings of Data Analytics and Management, 2022

Covid-19 is an increasingly growing infective virus which really infects humans that interacted w... more Covid-19 is an increasingly growing infective virus which really infects humans that interacted with it. Whilst these clinicians have mostly been infected with such a respiratory tract disease whenever they come in contact with both the disease, it was revealed in a clinical trial of COVID-19 treated persons that they had been mostly diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection when they made contact with the disease. A chest x-ray (also recognised as radiography) is a somewhat complicated imaging technique for detecting concerns in the respiratory system. Artificial intelligence is the most widely used accomplished machine learning algorithm for examining a substantial array of chest x-ray images, but it has the capacity to have a significant impact on Covid-19 testing. In this study, we have used PA interpret of x-rays tests both for covid-19 patients and safe individuals. We tested CNN templates and deep learning strategies. To review ResNeXt models and examine their performance ...

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2019

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become increasingly popular since their start in the yea... more Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become increasingly popular since their start in the year 2008. Universities known worldwide for their traditional confined classroom education are also changing their practices by hosting MOOCs. These are Internet-based courses where students can learn at their own pace and follow their own schedule. Study materials and videos are provided that can be used in a blended learning program. Despite its many advantages, it suffers from problems such as high dropout and failure rates. Previous studies have mostly focused on predicting student dropout. This paper contributes to the body of research by investigating both student dropout and result prediction performance of machine learning models built based on different types of attributes such as demographic info, assessment info and interaction with the VLE. An analysis on the OULAD dataset showed that models based on student's interaction with the VLE achieved the high performance in terms of AUC, of up to 0.91 for dropout prediction and 0.93 for result prediction in case of Gradient Boosting Machine.

The main objective of developing this system is to present an automated way to keep track of atte... more The main objective of developing this system is to present an automated way to keep track of attendance which would reduce the present pen and paper based manual method of marking attendance. Replacing the tedious old method this system will save time, reduce the amount of work the teachers has to do and will replace the stationery material with a computer based system. This system deals with the maintenance of the student's attendance details. It generates the attendance of the student on basis of presence in class. It is maintained on the daily basis of their attendance. The staffs will be provided with the separate username & password to make the student's presence. The staffs handling the particular subjects will be responsible to mark the attendance for all students. Only if the student present on that particular period, the attendance will be marked.

International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012

Network Slicing is one of the most promising possibilities that will be provided by 5G networks, ... more Network Slicing is one of the most promising possibilities that will be provided by 5G networks, allowing customer-specific services to run on a heterogeneous set of physical resources. In 5G, Bells Labs is aiming at the possibility of federating both 3GPP and non-3GPP resources, to create the infrastructure suited for Network Slicing. These resources must be organized and their coverage evaluated, solving two aspects: the problem of deduction (prediction of coverage interaction between resources starting from the relative positioning) and the problem of detection (estimation of resources’ signal quality). During the internship, a graph-based database has been built exploiting internal and external sources. Several techniques for both deduction and detection have been studied, among which the INF-score-based algorithm has been selected for deduction and the coverage radius estimation technique has been used to perform detection. A first baseline pipeline has been built to solve the ...

Cardiovascular dysfunction is a major cause of morbidity and mortally. As such, the characterizat... more Cardiovascular dysfunction is a major cause of morbidity and mortally. As such, the characterization of the heart and surrounding vessels has a high clinical significance. The advent of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has provided an effective and efficient, noninvasive method of looking at the cardiovascular system. This thesis investigates the application of MRI in the quantification of two particular aspects of the cardiovascular system: arterial blood flow and the left atrium (LA). The use of pulse wave velocity (PWV) in flow quantification is explored. The majority of prevalent techniques use landmarks in the time-domain to calculate PWV. However, this presents problems with reliability due to the low temporal resolution of MRI flow data. A frequency-domain based approach through the use of the Fourier transform is investigated. This method is shown to be effective in minimizing errors found in the time-domain calculations. Dual-contour propagation is a post-processing technique used to produce contours. This is done through the propagation of manually drawn end-diastole (ED) and end-systole (ES) contours throughout the cardiac cycle. The method has been previously validated in regards to its applicability for ventricular data. The application of this technique with LA MRI images is considered and shown to be a valid propagation method. Finally, different approaches to volumetric quantification of the LA are explored. Issues are raised with the accepted serial short-axis and area-length calculation methods and a new virtual short-axis method is proposed. This method seeks to compensate for the inaccurate geometric assumptions made by the area length method whilst avoiding the time intensive use of the short-axis in quantification. This method is shown to be effective and efficient method for volumetric analysis. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Thomas S. Denney Jr. From my time as an undergraduate, he has afforded me great opportunities through the Auburn University MRI Research Center. From his instruction on MATLAB to teaching me to use the MRI machines, he has made this work possible. His wisdom and insight have guided me in my work and helped me explore the field of cardiovascular MRI. His enthusiasm for the research has helped cultivate a profound fascination with the subject. Dr. Nouha Salibi has been both an invaluable resource and a constantly uplifting presence during my time at Auburn. Her comprehensive knowledge of MRI has helped me overcome many roadblocks. I would also like to thank my advisory committee: Dr. Gopikrishna Desphande and Dr.Stanley J. Reeves for their support in my thesis and my work.

Papers in Regional Science, 2021

Y2O3:Eu nanophosphors are prepared from different synthesis viz. Combustion synthesis, Precipitat... more Y2O3:Eu nanophosphors are prepared from different synthesis viz. Combustion synthesis, Precipitation Method, Sol-Gel. The samples are annealed from 600-14000C temperature. Effect of Temperature on luminescence intensity of Europium Doped Y2O3 phosphor prepared from different synthesisroutes is studied in the presented paper. Prepared samples are found to have monoclinic structure when compared with JCPDS standard data. The luminescence intensity increases with the increase of particle size and is affected by synthesis route. Eu doped Y2O3 particle shows sharp emission at 611nm at UV excitation. The samples are excited with different UV wavelength and maximum emission intensity is found when excited with 234nm wavelength. Powder X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) results indicated that high temperature leads to increase in the particle size. TEM photographs show the agglomeration of the samples at higher temperature.

Chocolate industry is among the most polluting of the food industries in regard to its large wate... more Chocolate industry is among the most polluting of the food industries in regard to its large water consumption. Chocolate is one of the major industries causing water pollution. Considering the increased milk demand, the Chocolate industry in India is expected to grow rapidly and have the waste generation and related environmental problems are also assumed increased importance. Poorly treated wastewater with high level of pollutants caused by poor design, operation or treatment systems creates major environmental problems when discharged to the surface land or water. Various operations in a Chocolate industry may include pasteurization, cream, cheese, milk powder etc. Considering the above stated implications an attempt has been made in the present project to evaluate one of the Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) for Chocolate waste. Samples are collected from three points; Collection tank (CT), outflow of Anaerobic Contact Filter (ACF) and Secondary clarifier (SC) to evaluate the perfo...

2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2021

As many robot automation applications increasingly rely on multi-core processing or deep-learning... more As many robot automation applications increasingly rely on multi-core processing or deep-learning models, cloud computing is becoming an attractive and economically viable resource for systems that do not contain high computing power onboard. Despite its immense computing capacity, it is often underused by the robotics and automation community due to lack of expertise in cloud computing and cloud-based infrastructure. Fog Robotics balances computing and data between cloud edge devices. We propose a software framework, FogROS, as an extension of the Robot Operating System (ROS), the defacto standard for creating robot automation applications and components. It allows researchers to deploy components of their software to the cloud with minimal effort, and correspondingly gain access to additional computing cores, GPUs, FPGAs, and TPUs, as well as predeployed software made available by other researchers. FogROS allows a researcher to specify which components of their software will be deployed to the cloud and to what type of computing hardware. We evaluate FogROS on 3 examples: (1) simultaneous localization and mapping (ORB-SLAM2), (2) Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) GPU-based grasp planning, and (3) multi-core motion planning using a 96core cloud-based server. In all three examples, a component is deployed to the cloud and accelerated with a small change in system launch configuration, while incurring additional latency of 1.2 s, 0.6 s, and 0.5 s due to network communication, the computation speed is improved by 2.6×, 6.0× and 34.2×, respectively. Code, videos, and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/ FogROS.

International Journal of Computer and Communication Technology, 2014

Effective storage utilization is the key concept for better working of any operating system. Even... more Effective storage utilization is the key concept for better working of any operating system. Even operating systems used for mobile phones are not an exception for this fact. This paper proposes a technique for maximizing the utilization of the storage space present in mobile phones. Thus it is important to utilize the space occupied by SMS files in phone’s memory, which take maximum space. The objective involved is designing a semantic dictionary based on Intelligent Dictionary Based Encoding (IDBE) which provides a high text compression ratio to utilize the space in phone’s memory. When SMS file will be received, English words present in the text will be replaced by the respective short words in the designed semantic dictionary. Thus replacing English words by the respective short forms reduces the space occupied by the SMS file. The paper describes the IDBE Compression Techniques for SMS Text Compression.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Education is often claimed to reduce social exclusion and crime, yet there is little empirical ev... more Education is often claimed to reduce social exclusion and crime, yet there is little empirical evidence beyond that for increased schooling. In this study, we estimate the crime-reducing effects of participating in post-secondary vocational education and training (VET) between ages 16 and 44, exploiting a natural experiment in Australia that increased VET participation in the state of Victoria, but not in the neighbouring state of New South Wales. Using postcode (zipcode) level administrative data and difference-indifferences estimation, we find that increased VET participation is associated with reduced person, drug and property crime. We find much larger effects for mature-age people (26-44) than for young people (16-25), possibly because crime at this age is more closely linked to legitimate labor market opportunities. These results provide plausibly causal evidence that extending opportunities for later-life education and training can have substantial public benefits.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

This study uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HI... more This study uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to provide a descriptive analysis of teacher careers in Australia, looking at transitions in and out of teaching, the length of spells spent teaching, remuneration and job satisfaction in both government and non-government school sectors. Each year, approximately 14 per cent of teachers leave teaching (becoming a principal is not counted as leaving teaching). Most who leave return to teaching at some stage, commonly after a gap of just one or two years. This absence from teaching is typically associated with starting a family. Overall, teachers are just as satisfied with their jobs as other professionals, and express aboveaverage levels of job satisfaction in relation to job security, but below average satisfaction in relation to job flexibility (i.e. work/life balance). Those who left teaching recorded substantially lower job satisfaction on all aspects of their job while teaching, which su gests they were no longer well suited to teaching. The starting wages of full-time teachers are similar to those of other full-time professions, but their wages grow much more slowly with experience than other professions, for both males and females.

Journal of Medical Science And clinical Research, 2018

Burkholderia cepacia is a group of highly virulent organisms known as Burkholderia cepacia comple... more Burkholderia cepacia is a group of highly virulent organisms known as Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc). Bcc are ubiquitous and most commonly found in moist places, on plant roots and soil. Because of its high intrinsic resistance to antibiotics, Bcc is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients.Usualy, It is reported in immunocompromised patients especially in patients with cystic fibrosis. Here, we report a rare case report of pneumonia by Burkholderia cepacia in an immunocompetent patient, who presented with fever and Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (MODS). Burkholderia cepacia was isolated from his sputum culture.

Empirical Economics, 2017

The federally-funded, HUD-administered Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was enacted in th... more The federally-funded, HUD-administered Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was enacted in the wake of the financial recession to mitigate the underlying adverse neighborhood effects associated with foreclosed properties. We examined the neighborhood price impacts of NSP-funded foreclosure rehabilitation undertaken by Habitat for Humanity in Dallas County, Texas using a difference-indifference framework. Foreclosure rehabilitation projects in Dallas County produced an average 15% increase in neighborhood home prices that sold up to 30 months after the rehabilitated property sale and within 0.1 miles of the rehabilitated property. Foreclosure rehabilitation that involved significant exterior repairs was associated with the largest estimated effect sizes. Results suggest that NSP-funding in Dallas County effectively targeted homes that had the potential to have the most severe neighborhood impacts, and that rehabilitation was an effective means of reversing neighborhood price externalities associated with blighted foreclosed properties.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.