Biosolids, or sewage sludge treated at a wastewater treatment plant are generated in great quantities worldwide and are growing with increasing population. In the UAE, it can be estimated that 457 ton of biosolids are produced every day. Globally, the beneficial use of biosolids is still low, and it is mostly landfilled, which leads to greenhouse emissions and represents a substantial operating cost for wastewater treatment plants. In most wastewater treatment plants, along with biosolids, biogas is generated, opening possibilities for thermal applications of sewage sludge. However, each plant produces biosolids with different compositions and properties, not yet known in the case of UAE wastewater plants, in order to propose a suitable beneficial use to avoid landfilling. Biosolids samples were collected at an Abu Dhabi Wastewater Treatment Plant and characterized. A high proportion of organic compounds (65%) was measured, along with beneficial compounds for thermal reactions.
In this paper, the design of an application specific Central Processing Unit (CPU) for Caesar cipher encryption is proposed. The proposed system takes an input string, encrypts it, store it in memory for displays or transmission. Moreover, the same system was used for decryption simultaneously. After the Instruction Set Architecture is designed, an RTL code using verilog was developed in order to realize the system. An FPGA was used to emulate the system. Designed CPU was synthesized using 65nm technology and the system could operate at a power consumption of 434 ? W when operating at 100 MHz from a power supply of 1V. Applicationspecific processors have advantage over general purpose processors in operating at ultralow power consumption.
Software defined radio (SDR) is one of the major innovations in the digital communications industry due to its flexibility and reconfigurability features. The extra features from the SDR come with new security challenges for the radio system that uses reconfigurable software/waveform instead of hardwareonly solution. One of the main security problems is how to download a waveform securely to the SDR, with minimum cost, simple key management, and reduced risk. We propose a solution that combines three main building blocks: Physically unclonable functions, softwarebased attestation, and proof of secure erasure. The protocol is very efficient with low complexity and low cost.
According to Nyquist rate theorem, in order to acquire the data without loss, you have to sample at a rate equal or more than twice the bandwidth. However, this will result in occupying more memory space especially in applications that have stringent memory and power constraints. Compressive sensing or sampling (CS) is a compressing technique that can be used to capture the data at significantly lower rate. This paper discusses the contemporary research work on compressive sensing for ECG signals. Additionally, many reconstruction algorithms have been discussed such as regularized leastsquares (RLS) and Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). Many efforts have been done for hardware implementation of CS technique, a VLSI implementation of OMP is introduced.
This paper introduces an efficient reconfigurable, multiple voltage gain switchedcapacitor DCDC buck converter as part of a power management unit for wearable electronics. The proposed switchedcapacitor converter has an input voltage of 0.6V to 1.2V generated from an energy harvesting source. The switchedcapacitor converter utilizes pulse frequency modulation to generate multiple regulated output voltage levels, namely 1V, 0.8V and 0.6V based on two reconfigurable bits over a wide range of load currents from 10uA to 800uA. The switchedcapacitor converter is designed and fabricated in 65nm low power CMOS technology and occupies an area of 0.493mm2. The design utilizes a stack of MIM and MOS capacitances to optimize the circuit area and efficiency. The measured peak efficiency is 80% at a load current of 800uA and regulated load voltage of 1V.
In this paper, a new color image encryption/decryption scheme based on synchronization of fractionalorder discretetime chaotic systems is presented. The method is based on permutationdiffusion structure. The parameters and fractional orders of the chaotic system play the role of secret keys of the encryption/decryption scheme. To increase the robustness of the proposed scheme, the plain image is firstly permuted by the sequence generated from the fractional system. Then, by generating another sequence by the same system, the permuted image is diffused using XOR operation. Based on dead beat obsever, the exact synhronization of fractionalorder system is established, and the decryption is achieved. Simulation results are preseneted to highlight the performances of the proposed method.
With an increase in cloud applications and services, data centers are experiencing tremendous increase in data traffic. Data center network (DCN) topology plays an important role in providing acceptable level of performance to cloud applications. This paper presents some initial results of simulation studies comparing the performance of several wellknown DCN topologies under the same simulation and internetwork traffic workload environments. We also discuss the performance results for the topologies when a link or a switch in the network fails.
Coral reefs represent one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on our planet. Coral reefs consist of colonies of tiny sea animals belonging to the phylum Cnidaria, and of more complex, yet not so well known microbial communities. A number of factors including microbial community composition, climate change and human impact affect their sustainability and overall health. In this study, microbial community composition of two coral reefs from Lizard Island were evaluated. The most abundant bacterial phyla were Proteobacteria, with the total presence of 51.73%, followed by Cyanobacteria (15.86%) and Bacteriodetes (10.41%). Additionally, differential abundance analysis was performed for operational taxonomic units (OTUs) present in at least two of the examined samples, based on clustering by compartment. Subsequently, significant OTUs were identified, and enrichment analysis was performed, revealing differentially significant OTUs. The proposed methodology in this work will be used in the future for addressing coral related diseases and bleaching.
Cloud computing infrastructures are designed to support accessibility and availability of various services to consumers over the Internet. However, from service provider's perspective, the growing demand of cloud infrastructure services result in an increase in power consumption and high carbon emissions. In this paper a linear programming (LP) model is developed to optimize power consumption of the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) by scheduling requests from consumers to resources that result in less power usage while meeting the deadline for each request and maintaining the quality of service. Lingo? Solver is used to provide the exact solution of the proposed model.
Text mining has become an important topic in bioinformatics research since the past decade has witnessed the massive growth in the biomedical literature. Mining the biomedical literature has resulted in an incredible number of computational algorithms that assist many bioinformatics researchers. In this paper, we discuss text mining techniques used in bioinformatics, specifically in the area of protein function prediction and by using cooccurrence approach. We present our approach for predicting the functions of human proteins by extracting information and presenting their cooccurrence relation from the biomedical literature.
