THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues

Communications of the ACM (CACM for short, not the best sounding acronym around) is the ACM’s flagship magazine. Started in 1957, CACM is handy for keeping up to date on current research being carried out across all topics of computer science and realworld applications. CACM has had an illustrious past with many influential pieces of work and debates started within its pages. These include Hoare’s presentation of the Quicksort algorithm; Rivest, Shamir and Adleman’s description of the first publickey cryptosystem RSA; and Dijkstra’s famous letter against the use of GOTO. In addition to the print edition, which is released monthly, there is a fantastic website (http://cacm.acm. org/) that showcases not only the most recent edition but all previous CACM articles as well, readable online as well as downloadable as a PDF. In addition, the website lets you browse for articles by subject, a handy feature if you want to focus on a particular topic. CACM is really essential reading. Pretty much guaranteed to contain content that is interesting to anyone, it keeps tabs on the latest in computer science. It is a valuable asset for us students, who tend to delve deep into a particular area of CS and forget everything that is happening around us. — Daniel Gooch U ndergraduate research is like a box of chocolates: You never know what kind of project you will get. That being said, there are still a few things you should know to get the most out of the experience.

Communications of the ACM

Hydrogels in sensing applications

Privacy preservation in blockchain based IoT systems: Integration issues, prospects, challenges, and future research directions

Research in digital watermarking is mature. Several software implementations of watermarking algorithms are described in the literature, but few attempts have been made to describe hardware implementations. The ultimate objective of the research is to develop low-power, high- performance, real-time, reliable and secure watermarking systems, which can be achieved through hardware implementations. The development of a very-large-scale integration architecture for a high-performance watermarking chip is presented which can perform both invisible robust and invisible fragile image watermarking in the spatial domain. The watermarking architecture is prototyped in two ways: (i) by using a Xilinx field-programmable gate array and (ii) by building a custom integrated circuit. This prototype is the first watermarking chip with both invisible robust and invisible fragile watermarking capabilities.

VLSI architecture and chip for combined invisible robust and fragile watermarking

This paper proposes a novel flow for parasitic and process-variation aware design of radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs). A nano-CMOS current-starved voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) circuit has been designed using this flow as a case study. The oscillation frequency is considered as the objective optimization function with the area overhead as constraint. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out on the parasitic extracted netlist of the VCO to study the effect of process variation on the oscillation frequency. In the design cycle, a performance degradation of 43.5% is observed when the parasitic extracted netlist is subjected to worst-case process variation. The proposed design flow could bring the oscillation frequency within 4.5% of the target, leading to convergence of the complete design in only one design iteration. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper presents the first work focussed on a current starved VCO in which the combined effect of parasitics and process variations has been considered.

Design of Parasitic and Process-Variation Aware Nano-CMOS RF Circuits: A VCO Case Study

Resource -constrained distributed systems such as the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and fog computing are deployed for real-time monitoring and evaluation. Current security solutions are problematic when there is a centralized controlling entity. The blockchain provides decentralized security architectures using proof-of-work (PoW). Proof-of-work is an expensive process for IoT and edge computing due to the deployment of resource-constrained devices. This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh) to replace Proof-of-Work and introduce authentication in such environments to make the blockchain application-specific. This paper implemented the Proof-of-Authentication system to evaluate its sustainability and applicability for the IoT and edge computing. The evaluation process is conducted in both simulation and real-time testbeds to evaluate performance. Finally, the process of Proof-of-Authentication and its integration with blockchain in resource-constrained distributed systems is discussed. Our proposed PoAh, while running in limited computer resources (e.g. single-board computing devices like the Raspberry Pi) has a latency in the order of 3 secs.

/pdf/proof-of-authentication-for-scalable-blockchain-in-resource-41pwm6v16d.pdf

Proof-of-Authentication for Scalable Blockchain in Resource-Constrained Distributed Systems

Image or video exchange over the Internet of Things (IoT) is a requirement in diverse applications, including smart health care, smart structures, and smart transportations. This paper presents a modular and extensible quadrotor architecture and its specific prototyping for automatic tracking applications. The architecture is extensible and based on off-the-shelf components for easy system prototyping. A target tracking and acquisition application is presented in detail to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the proposed design. Complete design details of the platform are also presented. The designed module implements the basic proportional–integral–derivative control and a custom target acquisition algorithm. Details of the sliding-window-based algorithm are also presented. This algorithm performs $20\times $ faster than comparable approaches in OpenCV with equal accuracy. Additional modules can be integrated for more complex applications, such as search-and-rescue, automatic object tracking, and traffic congestion analysis. A hardware architecture for the newly introduced Better Portable Graphics (BPG) compression algorithm is also introduced in the framework of the extensible quadrotor architecture. Since its introduction in 1987, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) graphics format has been the de facto choice for image compression. However, the new compression technique BPG outperforms the JPEG in terms of compression quality and size of the compressed file. The objective is to present a hardware architecture for enhanced real-time compression of the image. Finally, a prototyping platform of a hardware architecture for a secure digital camera (SDC) integrated with the secure BPG (SBPG) compression algorithm is presented. The proposed architecture is suitable for high-performance imaging in the IoT and is prototyped in Simulink. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever proposed hardware architecture for SBPG compression integrated with an SDC.

Design of a High-Performance System for Secure Image Communication in the Internet of Things

Modern sensing devices play a pivotal role in achieving data acquisition, communication, and dissemination for the Internet of Things (IoT). Naturally, IoT applications and intelligent sensing systems supported by sensing devices, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), are closely coupled. Modern intelligent sensing systems generate huge volumes of sensing data, well beyond the processing capabilities of common techniques and tools. As a result, collecting, managing, and processing IoT big sensing data within an acceptable time duration is a new challenge for both research and industrial applications. The massive size, extreme complexity, and high speed of big sensing data bring new technical requirements including data collection, data storage, data organization, data analysis, and data publishing in real time when deploying real-world IoT applications. To better facilitate these IoT applications, the convergent research of WSNs, big data, the IoT, and cloud computing is a natural scientific development trend. In this article, we concentrate on big-sensing-data curation and preparation issues with cloud computing under the theme of the IoT. There are three especially critical issues that need to be addressed: scalable big-sensing-data cleaning, scalable big-sensing-data compression, and cloud-based data curation response for IoT device optimization. Viewed from the IoT side, all IoT sensing devices are integrated together in an adaptive solution and upload their data onto the cloud. The automatic responses from both the cloud and intelligent sensors will change the status or behavior of sensing devices and, therefore, the status of the IoT itself.

Big-Sensing-Data Curation for the Cloud is Coming: A Promise of Scalable Cloud-Data-Center Mitigation for Next-Generation IoT and Wireless Sensor Networks

Elias Kougianos

Papers

VLSI architecture and chip for combined invisible robust and fragile watermarking

Design of Parasitic and Process-Variation Aware Nano-CMOS RF Circuits: A VCO Case Study

Proof-of-Authentication for Scalable Blockchain in Resource-Constrained Distributed Systems

Design of a High-Performance System for Secure Image Communication in the Internet of Things

Big-Sensing-Data Curation for the Cloud is Coming: A Promise of Scalable Cloud-Data-Center Mitigation for Next-Generation IoT and Wireless Sensor Networks