Gergely Fordos

A common periodic table of codons and amino acids.

A periodic table of codons has been designed where the codons are in regular locations. The table has four fields (16 places in each) one with each of the four nucleotides (A, U, G, C) in the central codon position. Thus, AAA (lysine), UUU (phenylalanine), GGG (glycine), and CCC (proline) were placed into the corners of the fields as the main codons (and amino acids) of the fields. They were connected to each other by six axes. The resulting nucleic acid periodic table showed perfect axial symmetry for codons. The corresponding amino acid table also displaced periodicity regarding the biochemical properties (charge and hydropathy) of the 20 amino acids and the position of the stop signals. The table emphasizes the importance of the central nucleotide in the codons and predicts that purines control the charge while pyrimidines determine the polarity of the amino acids. This prediction was experimentally tested.

Student attendance monitoring at the university using NFC

There are several complex business processes in the higher education. As the number of university students has been tripled in Hungary the automation of these task become necessary. The Near Field Communication (NFC) technology provides a good opportunity to support the automated execution of several education related processes. Recently a new challenge is identified at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. As most of the lecture notes had become available in electronic format the students especially the inexperienced freshman ones did not attend to the lectures significantly decreasing the rate of successful exams. This drove to the decision to elaborate an accurate and reliable information system for monitoring the students attendance at the lectures. Thus we have developed a novel, NFC technology based business use case of student attendance monitoring. In order to meet the requirements of the use case we have implemented a highly autonomous distributed environment assembled by NFC enabled embedded devices, so-called contactless terminals and a scalable backoffice. Beside the opportunity of contactless card based student identification the terminals support biometric identification by fingerprint reading. These features enable the implementation of flexible and secure identification scenarios. The attendance monitoring use case has been tested in a pilot project involving about 30 access terminals and more that 1000 students. In this paper we are introducing the developed attendance monitoring use case, the implemented NFC enabled system, and the experiences gained during the pilot project.

The StoLPan view of the NFC ecosystem

NFC is one of the latest wireless communication technologies, making possible variety of business opportunities. StoLPaN, a pan-European consortium of companies, universities and user groups aims to define open commercial and technical frameworks for the remote management of NFC-enabled services on mobile devices. These frameworks will facilitate the deployment of NFC-enabled mobile applications regardless of the phone type and the nature of the services required. This paper describes the latest results of StoLPan consortium, the technical and business challenges of the NFC service development, interesting findings about the current issues of the NFC market, and a summary about the StoLPan application framework containing NFC technological details. Application opportunities of NFC services in the retail environment are also introduced.

A Generalized Approach for NFC Application Development

NFC is one of the latest wireless communication technologies, making possible variety of business opportunities. The current paper presents a generalized approach for NFC application development, where the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), as well as service providers can make their own application and run it in the proposed common environment. We have developed the prototype of an application framework based on the generalized approach that provides not only the opportunity to create a new skin for the already existing application, but also makes possible rapid implementation of any kind of the business logic and the user interface. Further benefit of the application framework is that the technological details are hidden from the service application developers thus they can focus only on the proper implementation of the business logic and the user interface. The use of the environment has been demonstrated on a concrete application.

Building a contactless university examination system using NFC

Near Field Communication (NFC) is one of the latest wireless communication technologies, making possible variety of novel services on mobile equipments. At Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) a generalized approach for NFC application development has been elaborated, where applications can be implemented and executed in a common environment. We have developed the prototype of an application framework based on the generalized approach that provides the possibility of rapid implementation of any kind of the business logic and the user interface as well as the opportunity to create a new skin for the already existing application. Based on this framework we have implemented a system which aims to support the examination process at a university. This system covers large part of the examination process by utilizing the benefits of both the mobile and NFC technologies. By the use of the proposed system the examination process become significantly faster and requires less administrative work. The current paper provides a detailed description on the implemented examination system covering the identified roles and the technical business processes.

University life in contactless way - NFC use cases in academic environment

Using electronic transaction instead of manual ones is an easy way to facilitate business process automation. A cost effective option of introducing electronic transactions in public systems with high number of users is applying contactless cards and the related contactless infrastructure. The spreading of Near Field Communication (NFC) compatible mobile devices made relatively easy the implementation of such an infrastructure. In order to utilize the benefits of the NFC technology in the higher education environment an autonomous student attendance monitoring system - built up by a number of NFC capable identification terminals - has been introduced at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. During the elaboration of this system we put emphasis on the later expandability of it which should result in a comprehensive university contactless infrastructure. In the current article we will present a number of use cases which can utilize the benefits of the contactless technology to make the university life easier.

Security issues of service installation on a multi application NFC environment

NFC is one of the latest wireless communication technologies, making possible variety of business opportunities. At Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) a generalized approach for NFC application development has been elaborated, where the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), as well as service providers can make their own application and run it in the proposed common environment. We have developed the prototype of an application framework based on the generalized approach that provides the possibility of rapid implementation of any kind of the business logic and the user interface as well as the opportunity to create a new skin for the already existing application. Further benefit of the application framework is that the technological details are hidden from the service application developers thus they can focus only on the proper implementation of the business logic and the user interface. One of the main units of the developed framework is a script application execution environment (the so called scripting host) running on mobile equipments. The scripting host allows the user to dynamically manage and access NFC based services using the underlying mobile equipment. The current paper presents the security consideration of the script installation and execution procedures.

A novel ECG telemetry and monitoring system based on Z-Wave communication

This paper presents a novel ECG telemetry system based on Z-Wave communication protocol. The proposed system consists of small portable devices that acquire, compress and transmit the ECG to a RF-USB interface connected to a central monitoring computer. The received signals are filtered, QRS complexes and P and T waves are localized, and different waveforms are classified in order to be able to provide diagnosis tools like heart rate variability and turbulence analysis. Due to the limitation of communication bandwidth, the maximum number of measuring devices connected to a central monitor is four. The proposed system composed of inexpensive components can serve as flexible alternative to current ECG monitoring systems.

Quick ECG Analysis for On-Line Holter Monitoring Systems

Computer-aided bedside patient monitoring requires real-time analysis of vital functions. On-line Holter monitors need reliable and quick algorithms to perform all the necessary signal processing tasks. This paper presents the methods that were conceptualized and implemented at the development of such a monitoring system at Medical Clinic No. 4 of Targu-Mures. The system performs the following ECG signal processing steps: (1) Decomposition of the ECG signals using multi-resolution wavelet transform, which also eliminates most of the high and low frequency noises. These components will serve as input for wave classification algorithms; (2) Identification of QRS complexes, P and T waves using two different algorithms: a sequential clustering and a neural-network-based classification. This latter also distinguishes normal R waves from abnormal cases; (3) Localization of several kinds of arrhythmia using a spectral method. An autoregressive model is applied to estimate the series of R-R intervals. The coefficients of the AR model are predicted using the Kalman filter, and these coefficients will determine a local spectrum for each QRS complex. By analyzing this spectrum, different arrhythmia cases are identified. The algorithms were tested using the MIT-BIH signal database and own multichannel ECG registrations. The QRS complex detection ratio is over 99.5%

A novel virtual machine based approach for hosting NFC services on mobile devices

NFC is one of the latest wireless communication technologies, making possible variety of business opportunities. At Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) a generalized approach for NFC application development has been elaborated, where the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), as well as service providers can make their own application and run it in the proposed common environment. The developed a virtual machine like application execution framework gives the opportunity of rapid implementation of any kind of business logic and user interface for NFC applications and provides high level of application security. The current paper presents the developed novel NFC application development approach, the applied technical solutions and the implemented script execution environment running on a mobile device.