This paper reviews studies using empirical, data-driven methodologies, such as cluster analysis and latent class analysis, to identify clustering patterns of diet, physical activity and sedentary behavior among children or adolescents and their associations with socio-demographic indicators, and overweight and obesity.

The clustering of diet, physical activity and sedentary behavior in children and adolescents: a review

One of the great technological challenges in 21st century is the development of renewable energy technologies due to serious problems related with the production and use of energy. A new promising area of research grows rapidly which is called Nanotechnologies are considered nowadays one of the most recommended choices to solve this problem. This review aims to introduce several significant applications of nanotechnology in renewable energy systems. Papers reviewed including theoretical and experimental works related with nanotechnology applications in solar, hydrogen, wind, biomass, geothermal and tidal energies. A lot of literature are reviewed and summarized carefully in a useful tables to give a panoramic overview about the role of nanotechnology in improving the various sources of renewable energies. We think that this paper can be considered as an important bridge between nanotechnology and all available kinds of renewable energies. From the other side, further researches are required to study the effect of nanotechnology to enhance the renewable energy industry especially in geothermal, wind and tidal energies, since the available papers in these fields are limited.

Applications of nanotechnology in renewable energies—A comprehensive overview and understanding

Traditional power grids are being transformed into smart grids (SGs) to address the issues in the existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability, and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution, and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis, and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers, and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation, and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of energy by incorporating the IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators, and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation, and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications, and prototypes of the IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges, and future research directions for the IoT-aided SG systems.

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Internet of Things-Aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

In last few years, many countries in the world have shown huge interest in smart grid technology. They are facing many challenges in the process of deployment of this technology at ground level. Hence a planned research is required to meet those challenges within time. This paper provides a detailed description of progress in the field of demand side management, demand response programs, distributed generation, technical issues in the way of their progress and key advantages, which will be received after the final deployment of these programs. Renewable energy resources are also becoming a main part of distributed generation, which provides a solution for environmental problems caused by conventional power plants. Few countries are working on the deployment of the advanced metering system. Along with this, the scope of research in various programs of smart grid technology has been explored.

Smart operations of smart grids integrated with distributed generation: A review

Smart grid is envisioned to meet the 21st century energy requirements in a sophisticated manner with real time approach by integrating the latest digital communications and advanced control technologies to the existing power grid. It will connect the global users through energy efficiency and awareness corridor. This paper presents a comprehensive review of Wireless Communications Technologies (WCTs) for implementation of smart grid in a systematic way. Various network attributes like internet protocol (IP) support, power usage, data rate etc. are considered to compare the communications technologies in smart grid context. Techniques suitable for Home Area Networks (HANs) like ZigBee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 6LoWPAN and Z-Wave are discussed and compared in context of consumer concerns and network attributes. A similar approach in context of utilities concerns is adopted for wireless communications techniques for Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) which include WiMAX and GSM based cellular standards. Smart grid applications, associated network issues and challenges are elaborated at the end.

A review of wireless communications for smart grid

As a consequence of rapidly increased CO 2 emissions, humanity is facing global warming. Electricity generation accounts for almost half of the emission; besides, conventional electrical production based on fossil fuel is becoming more and more expensive. One approach to significantly slow down global warming is to drive our society away from the current fossil fuel fiesta and use only renewable power such as solar and wind energy. Another approach is to improve the management of energy production, transmission, and distribution. Part of the latter solution is on the supply side, where one possible solution is to develop continent-wide smart power grids and energy storage systems. However, an equally important part of the solution is on the demand side, where technologies and applications that can work with this type of unpredictable energy consumption are becoming necessary. The smart power grid with new sources of data, fast growth of information, and proactive management requires new strategy for business and operational management. In this paper we discuss how Cloud computing model can be used for developing Smart Grid solutions. The Cloud computing model is based on the delivery of computing as a service, whereby storage, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a commodity over the Internet. The advantages of Cloud computing – reduced costs, increased storage, on-demand performance, and better flexibility – have motivated many companies in recent years to move their IT operations to the cloud; the same advantages can be used to achieve the most important future goals of a large-scale Smart Grid, such as energy savings, two-way communication, and demand resource management.

Smart power grid and cloud computing

Robots have found their purpose in various situations, from speeding the manufacturing processes to performing complicated tasks in dangerous and hostile environments. One of the important problems in robotics is mobile robot path planning. Robot path planning represents a hard optimization problem that needs to be solved in numerous applications. In this paper we propose path planning method in environments with static obstacles based on the recent swarm intelligence algorithm, brain storm optimization. The brain storm optimization algorithm was improved by local search procedure that each new candidate solution moves to the local best position thus reducing computational time. We tested the proposed method on several benchmark examples from the literature and it has been shown that our approach finds better and more consistent paths using less computational time.

Mobile Robot Path Planning by Improved Brain Storm Optimization Algorithm

Urbanization, sustainability, energy efficiency, information and communication technology (ICT) and nanotechnology are emerging at the beginning of the 21st century. They are seeking to improve environmental effectiveness in the context of connected communities, global competitiveness, economic development, climate change, and demographic shifts. Virtually all proposed solutions to energy consumption and climate change acknowledge the role ICT plays as a key enabler of environmental effectiveness. One of the major challenges that the ICT sector faces today is that hardware is being pushed to its physical limits. The traditional means to reduce product size, increase functionality and enhance computing capabilities are becoming difficult and expensive every passing day. On the other hand, the industry is benefiting from nanotechnology advances with numerous applications including those in smarter sensors, logic elements, computer chips, memory storage devices, optoelectronics, quantum computing, etc. This paper presents an overview of the ICT benefiting from development in nanotechnology with respect to sustainability and energy efficiency.

Impact of nanotechnology advances in ICT on sustainability and energy efficiency

Energy saving is an important issue in the times of increasing energy prices. Products and services provided by the information and communication technology (ICT) can support energy efficiency and emissions reductions. The synergy of ICT and a residential area gives rise to the smart home environment. Ecological and smart home network applications should not only improve the peoples life satisfaction in the domain of health care, security protection, and efficient management of energy and resource consumption, but they should also enable personal happy life through easy communication with community people, high level entertainment, continuous education and so on. A smart home in the smart grid is the latest addition to a family of ideas emerging in relation to the ICT usage in the home. This paper presents an overview of the smart home concept and some challenges that ICT faces in that environment.

RETRACTED: Challenges of information and communication technology in energy efficient smart homes

Leukemia or blood cancer is a disease that affects a large population, especially children. Fast and early detection of four main types of leukemia is crucial for successful treatment and patient’s recovery. Leukemia can be detected in microscope blood images by detecting blasts, i.e. not fully developed white blood cells. Computer-aided diagnostic systems can improve the quality and speed of abnormal lymphocytes detection. In this paper we proposed a method for automatic detection of one type of leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, by classifying white blood cells into normal cells and blasts. The proposed method uses shape and texture features as input vector for support vector machine optimized by bare bones fireworks algorithm. Based on the results obtained on the standard benchmark set, ALL-IDB, our proposed method shows a competitive accuracy of classification comparing to other state-of-the-art method.

Dejan Zivkovic

Papers

Smart power grid and cloud computing

Mobile Robot Path Planning by Improved Brain Storm Optimization Algorithm

Impact of nanotechnology advances in ICT on sustainability and energy efficiency

RETRACTED: Challenges of information and communication technology in energy efficient smart homes

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Cell Detection in Microscopic Digital Images Based on Shape and Texture Features