Pichaya Tandayya

Touching force response of the piezoelectric Braille cell

Purpose. The objective of this research is to investigate dynamic responses of the piezoelectric Braille cell when it is subjected to both electrical signal and touching force. Method. Physical behavior of the piezoelectric actuator inside the piezoelectric Braille cell is analyzed. The mathematical model of the piezoelectric Braille system is presented. Then, data of visually impaired people using a Braille Note is studied as design information and a reference input for calculation of the piezoelectric Braille response under the touching force. Results. The results show dynamic responses of the piezoelectric Braille cell. The designed piezoelectric bimorph has a settling time of 0.15 second. The relationship between the Braille dot height and applied voltage is linear. The behavior of the piezoelectric Braille dot when it is touched during operation shows that the dot height is decreased as the force increases. Conclusions. The result provides understanding of the piezoelectric Braille cell behavior under both touching force and electrical excitation simultaneously. This is the important issue for the design and development of piezoelectric Braille cells in senses of controlling Braille dot displacement or force-feedback in the future.

A flexible and scalable component-based system architecture for video surveillance as a service, running on infrastructure as a service

There are many proposals for moving traditional video surveillance systems into the cloud, commonly known as Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS). Most systems use Hadoop technology for storing video records and distributing video analysis tasks. However, Hadoop is more appropriate for video retrieval services than real time video analysis. Also, existing systems offer neither flexible deployment plans, nor are they capable of automatically minimizing the number of required servers (whether they are physical or virtual machines). Our proposal involves the design and implementation of a component-based VSaaS running on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This paper focuses on the design concepts and component functions that provide solutions for the availability and scalability of VSaaS. Our system can easily scale from one server up to a more complex cluster to support the varying requirements of users. It accesses cloud services via Amazon EC2 for computing services and Amazon S3 API for object storage services, since they are supported by many cloud computing IaaS providers. We also present a components deployment that is suitable for any size and type of system, which combines both physical and virtual machines. Experiments show that the system performs well, and can tolerate difficult scenarios.

Design for a flexible video surveillance as a service

Current video surveillance systems are popular on standalone applications. A free video surveillance software usually fixes its configuration on a single desktop. This makes it is hard to scale the system up for supporting many cameras. Moreover, it also needs a one-stop management service method. Our research tries to enhance OpenVSS, an open source video surveillance system, for Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) so that it can be used by multiple users and runs on Infrastructure as a Service of Cloud Computing in the future.

Low-cost stereo vision system for supporting the visually impaired's walk

This paper presents an obstacle detection system for the visually impaired to use with a walking stick. The system in this work can find obstacles applying the depth discontinuities Pixel-to-Pixel (P2P) stereo algorithm which is one of the Intensity-based Stereo Matching (ISM) techniques in stereo vision that can find objects with featureless surface such as whiteboard, door, etc. However, the ISM technique is time consuming and not fast enough for real-time usage. Applying parallel computing using Message Passing Interface (MPI) helps reduce the computing time and enables realtime usage. In this work, we estimate the distance between objects and the visually impaired by applying the V-disparity. Our system can accurately detect objects within the range of 5 meters using 12-centimeter based-line low-cost webcams.

Taverna Workflow and Supporting Service for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Analysis

This paper describes a Taverna workflow environment with supporting web services for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) analysis of genes in shrimp. The workflow is used to investigate SNPs advantages for gene development. Our first workflow environment did not give satisfying results for the phylogenetic tree processes because the data flows between the web services would frequently time-out. Our solution employs local web service interfaces in a cluster, which Taverna accesses with the aid of Soaplab analysis tools. The cluster enables the modified workflow to rapidly process the large amount of sequenced data required by phylogenetic trees, and is highly reliable.

Linux user interface and front-end operation for the visually impaired

This paper presents a work that supports the visually impaired to be able to use the PSU Braille computer more easily. As the PSU Braille computer uses Linux as an operating system which can be unfamiliar to many users, this work focuses on the text-based user interface and front-end operation especially designed for the visually impaired and to support Braille devices including Braille printers, keyboards and displays. Along with the hardware development of the PSU Braille computer, the group has also developed translation software with Thai and English processing capability. The work in this paper also includes the integration of all translation programs, i.e. English, Thai, Math, Chemistry to Braille and vice versa, using the Extensive Markup Language (XML) and Braille Computer Code. In addition, the XML technology has also been applied extensively for classifying and collecting documents in the system.

Integrating the HLA RTI Services with Scilab

This paper describes the integration of the High Level Architecture (HLA), an IEEE standard for distributed interactive simulation, with a scientific software package (Scilab) and its use for collaborative simulation development. This work is an on-going work that aims to facilitate the interoperability and reusability for Scilab simulation models. Integrating HLA with the engineering and scientific software package will enable users to apply simulation techniques to larger and more complex interactive and independent simulation models using networked computers, including virtual environments. As the HLA employs the technique of callback functions as a means for communication amongst the Run-time Infrastructure (RTI), the HLA middleware, and the simulation nodes, the integration was not simple. The paper also gives an example application showing how the HLA services are used to enable Scilab to construct distributed interactive simulations.

Video surveillance as a service cost estimation and pricing model

There were many research works about video surveillance as a service system. Some concerned system architecture. Some identified cost optimization for the deployment of video surveillance systems using cloud computing technology. However, there was not much information about budget calculation for system provision. This paper addresses a cost investigation for video surveillance providers to use as a guideline for budget preparation. In addition, we propose a pricing model for monthly package based on real load resource usage.

Comparison of disk I/O power consumption in modern virtualization

In Cloud Computing, the topic about hypervisors is the key research as it concerns management of physical resources and deployment virtual machines. Currently, modern hypervisors obtain new features to increase their performance under different architectures. Cloud data centers start to adopt techniques for power consumption management that can reduce the power, and meanwhile maintain the performance. In this paper, we investigate on the power consumption and performance issues concerning memory and disk I/O, comparing two open-source virtualization platforms: Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). We compare Xen with raw disk and KVMs different disk I/O types, including the write through, write back and none modes with the block sizes of 8, 64 and 128 KB, relating to web downloading and database query workload. The results show that the KVM write back mode can reduce about a half (56%) of power consumption comparing to Xen with raw disk when writing files and the KVM write through mode with page cache can reduce power consumption to about 3% of that consumed by Xen with raw disk when reading files. In case of performance, the speed of KVM when page cache can increase to about 26 times faster than the speed of Xen with raw disk. In case of memory, the VMs power consumption is rather steady even when the memory usage varies.

An efficient process for enhancing genotype imputation in Genome-wide association studies using high performance computing

Genotype imputation based analysis usually consumes computational and data intensive. This paper presents a practical and efficient process for enhancing the genotype imputation based analysis on Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) using High Performance Computing (HPC). Our process is split into data quality control, haplotype estimation, and imputation. We validate and measure the process on a standard workstation and a server for pilot dataset of chromosome 22 from Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 (GAW16) provided by the North American Rheumatoid Arthritis Consortium (NARAC). The NARAC dataset consists of 2,062 individuals and 545,080 SNP variants. We use 1000 Genomes database as reference panels. Our process correctly and rapidly produces results more than ordinary steps of the genotype imputation based analysis.