Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to a base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments

Effective teaching may involve scientific understanding of learning processes, but the creation of engaging and rich learning experiences is more art than science. This presentation focuses on some key aspects of the art of teaching today's students, including specific techniques for tapping into student passions, empowering students to stay focused and balanced, shifting from lecture-intensive to learning-focused class sessions, and using new technologies to connect student learning to course content and life goals. Participants will explore course contracts and strategies for redesigning activities in support of a learning objective and share strategies for artfully managing student learning.

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The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in Demand Response (DR) as a means to provide flexibility, and hence improve the reliability of energy systems in a cost-effective way. Yet, the high complexity of the tasks associated with DR, combined with their use of large-scale data and the frequent need for near real-time de-cisions, means that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) — a branch of AI — have recently emerged as key technologies for enabling demand-side response. AI methods can be used to tackle various challenges, ranging from selecting the optimal set of consumers to respond, learning their attributes and pref-erences, dynamic pricing, scheduling and control of devices, learning how to incentivise participants in the DR schemes and how to reward them in a fair and economically efficient way. This work provides an overview of AI methods utilised for DR applications, based on a systematic review of over 160 papers, 40 companies and commercial initiatives, and 21 large-scale projects. The papers are classified with regards to both the AI/ML algorithm(s) used and the application area in energy DR. Next, commercial initiatives are presented (including both start-ups and established companies) and large-scale innovation projects, where AI methods have been used for energy DR. The paper concludes with a discussion of advantages and potential limitations of reviewed AI techniques for different DR tasks, and outlines directions for future research in this fast-growing area.

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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Approaches to Energy Demand-Side Response: A Systematic Review

The intra-mode and inter-mode predictions have been made available in H.264/AVC for effectively improving coding efficiency. However, exhaustively checking for all the prediction modes for identifying the best one (commonly referred to as exhaustive mode decision) greatly increases computational complexity. In this paper, a fast mode decision algorithm, called the motion activity-based mode decision (MAMD), is proposed to speed up the encoding process by reducing the number of modes required to be checked in a hierarchical manner, and is as follows. For each macroblock, the proposed MAMD algorithm always starts with checking the rate-distortion (RD) cost computed at the SKIP mode for a possible early termination, once the RD cost value is below a predetermined ldquolowrdquo threshold. On the other hand, if the RD cost exceeds another ldquohighrdquo threshold, then this indicates that only the intra modes are worthwhile to be checked. If the computed RD cost falls between the above-mentioned two thresholds, the remaining seven modes, which are classified into three motion activity classes in our work, will be examined, and only one of the three classes will be chosen for further mode checking. The above-mentioned motion activity can be quantitatively measured, which is equal to the maximum city-block length of the motion vector taken from a set of adjacent macroblocks (i.e., region of support, ROS). This measurement is then used to determine the most possible motion-activity class for the current macroblock. Experimental results have shown that, on average, the proposed MAMD algorithm reduces the computational complexity by 62.96%, while incurring only 0.059 dB loss in PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) and 0.19% increment on the total bit rate compared to that of exhaustive mode decision, which is a default approach set in the JM reference software.

Fast Mode Decision for H.264/AVC Based on Macroblock Motion Activity

© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Recently Internet of Things (IoT) is being used in several fields like smart city, agriculture, weather forecasting, smart grids, waste management, etc. Even though IoT has huge potential in several applications, there are some areas for improvement. In the current work, we have concentrated on minimizing the energy consumption of sensors in the IoT network that will lead to an increase in the network lifetime. In this work, to optimize the energy consumption, most appropriate Cluster Head (CH) is chosen in the IoT network. The proposed work makes use of a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm, namely, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) with Simulated Annealing (SA). To select the optimal CH in the clusters of IoT network, several performance metrics such as the number of alive nodes, load, temperature, residual energy, cost function have been used. The proposed approach is then compared with several state-of-the-art optimization algorithms like Artificial Bee Colony algorithm, Genetic Algorithm, Adaptive Gravitational Search algorithm, WOA. The results prove the superiority of the proposed hybrid approach over existing approaches.

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A metaheuristic optimization approach for energy efficiency in the IoT networks

Co-LAEEBA

Selecting an efficient variable block size mode in H.264 video coding standard for better compression performance is considered. The proposed scheme is based on a 3D recursive search algorithm and takes into account the motion vector cost and previous frame information. The best mode for the current macroblock is obtained by analysing the modes for a maximum of four macroblocks in the current and previous frames. An improvement in the encoding time with negligible impact on subjective and quantitative performance has been achieved.

Efficient block size selection in H.264 video coding standard

Demand side management (DSM) in smart grid authorizes consumers to make informed decisions regarding their energy consumption pattern and helps the utility in reducing the peak load demand during an energy stress time. This results in reduced carbon emission, consumer electricity cost, and increased grid sustainability. Most of the existing DSM techniques ignore priority defined by consumers. In this paper, we present priority-induced DSM strategy based on the load shifting technique considering various energy cycles of an appliance. The day-ahead load shifting technique proposed is mathematically formulated and mapped to multiple knapsack problem to mitigate the rebound peaks. The autonomous energy management controller proposed embeds three meta-heuristic optimization techniques; genetic algorithm, enhanced differential evolution, and binary particle swarm optimization along with optimal stopping rule, which is used for solving the load shifting problem. Simulations are carried out using three different appliances and the results validate that the proposed DSM strategy successfully shifts the appliance operations to off-peak time slots, which consequently leads to substantial electricity cost savings in reasonable waiting time, and also helps in reducing the peak load demand from the smart grid. In addition, we calculate the feasible regions to show the relationship between cost, energy consumption, and delay.

A priority-induced demand side management system to mitigate rebound peaks using multiple knapsack

The paper aims at selecting an efficient variable block size mode in H.264 video coding standard for better compression performance. This standard allows video frames to be partitioned into variable block sizes such that blocks containing highly detailed motion are represented using small block sizes and the rest using large block sizes. New techniques for intelligent selection of the variable block sizes have been developed to reduce the computational complexity without sacrificing the quality of the coder. The proposed schemes are based on the motion vector cost and previous frame information. An improvement in the encoding time with negligible impact on the subjective and the quantitative performance has been achieved. A comparison of the proposed techniques for various test sequences is also provided.

Selection of variable block sizes in H.264

The increasing popularity of wireless services and devices necessitates high bandwidth requirements; however, spectrum resources are not only limited but also heavily underutilized. Multiple license channels that support the same levels of QoS are desirable to resolve the problems posed by the scarcity and inefficient use of spectrum resources in multi-channel cognitive radio networks (MCRNs). One reason is that multimedia services and applications have distinct, stringent QoS requirements. However, due to a lack of coordination between primary and secondary users, identifying the QoS levels supported over available licensed channels has proven to be problematic and has yet to be attempted. This article presents a novel Bayesian non-parametric channel clustering scheme, which identifies the QoS levels supported over available license channels. The proposed scheme employs the infinite Gaussian mixture model and collapsed Gibbs sampler to identify the QoS levels from the feature space of the bit rate, packet delivery ratio, and packet delay variation of licensed channels. Moreover, the real measurements of wireless data traces and comparisons with baseline clustering schemes are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.

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Adnan Ahmad

Papers

Co-LAEEBA

Efficient block size selection in H.264 video coding standard

A priority-induced demand side management system to mitigate rebound peaks using multiple knapsack

Selection of variable block sizes in H.264

Channel Clustering and QoS Level Identification Scheme for Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks