Shalini R. Urs

Bibliometric indicators of Indian research collaboration patterns: A correspondence analysis

International collaboration is becoming an increasingly significant issue in science. During the last few years, a large number of bibliometric studies of co-authorships have been reported. Mostly, these studies have concentrated on country-to-country collaboration, revealing general patterns of interaction. In this study we analyze international collaborative patterns as indicated in the Indian publications by tracking out multi author publications as given in Science Citation Index (SCI) database. Correspondence analysis is used for analysis and interpretation of the results.According to correspondence analysis of the data set, Physics, Chemistry, Clinical medicine are the first, second and third largest subjects having international collaboration. USA, Italy, Germany, France, England are the top five countries with which India is collaborating. The data set shows an association between Physics and Italy, Switzerland, Algeria, Finland, South Korea, Russia, Netherlands contrasting an association between Biology & Biochemistry, Immunology, Ecology & Environment, Geosciences, Multidisciplinary subjects and England, Japan, Canada. It also shows an association between Agriculture and Philippines, Canada, Denmark in contrast to an association between Chemistry and Malaysia, Germany, France. An association between Clinical medicine, Astrophysics and England, Sweden, USA, New Zealand in contrast to an association between Agriculture and Canada, Philippines, Denmark is shown. An association between Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Neuroscience and Singapore, Canada, USA in contrast to an association between Chemistry, Astrophysics and Malaysia, Spain is shown. This association of collaborating countries and disciplines almost tallies with the publication productivity of these countries in different disciplines.

A novel sender authentication scheme based on hash chain for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are receiving enormous research attention in the wake of rising challenges of safe driving, and demand for infotainment services on the move. Information security in VANETs is a critical design issue, since public lives could be at stake. This paper presents a novel sender authentication scheme for enhancing VANET security. The scheme makes use of hash chaining, a well-known concept in cryptography, to authenticate vehicles. The authentication process takes place at a trusted third party site, called the Authentication Centre, and the RSUs (Road Side Units) help relay information exchanged between a vehicle and the Authentication Centre. A detailed discussion of the scheme is provided in the paper, and a security analysis is presented.

Development of prototype morphological analyzer for the South Indian language of Kannada

A prototype morphological analyzer for the south Indian language of Kannada is presented in this work. The analyzer is based on Finite state machines and can handle 500 distinct Noun and Verb stems of Kannada. The morphological analyzer can simultaneously serve as a stemmer, part of speech tagger and spell checker and hence it becomes a very efficient tool for content management.

Face Indexing and Retrieval by Spatial Similarity

In this paper a face indexing scheme based on spatial similarity is proposed. Spatial scattering of anatomically relevant dominant points on faces is preserved in the kd-tree index structure for efficient retrieval. The methodology is invariant to linear transformation and is robust for pose and expression variations. Experimentation on ORL face database has corroborated the retrieval effectiveness and time efficiency of the proposed methodology.

Copyright, academic research and libraries: balancing the rights of stakeholders in the digital age

Following an overview of the historical context of copyright legislation, this paper discusses copyright within the scholarly communication process and the role of libraries in providing access to copyright materials in the digital age. The argument is made that the balance of “rights” and “exceptions” that has been maintained for 300 years needs to be reconsidered for scholarly communications, such as theses and dissertations, as well as for articles in electronic journals. This type of information is fact‐based, often resulting from public funds, and is part of the intellectual heritage of academic institutions, and so is very different to creative works within the entertainment industries.

IAMKeys: Independent and Adaptive Management of Keys for Security in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have gained a lot of research attention in recent years since they offer tremendous benefits for remote health monitoring and continuous, real-time patient care. However, as with any wireless communication, data security in WBANs is a challenging design issue. Since such networks consist of small sensors placed on the human body, they impose resource and computational restrictions, thereby making the use of sophisticated and advanced encryption algorithms infeasible. This calls for the design of algorithms with a robust key generation / management scheme, which are reasonably resource optimal. This paper presents IAMKeys, an independent and adaptive key management scheme for improving the security of WBANs. The novelty of this scheme lies in the use of a randomly generated key for encrypting each data frame that is generated independently at both the sender and the receiver, eliminating the need for any key exchange. The simplicity of the encryption scheme, combined with the adaptability in key management makes the scheme simple, yet secure. The proposed algorithm is validated by performance analysis.

Development of Indian agricultural research ontology: semantic rich relations based information retrieval system for Vidyanidhi digital library

Digital Libraries represent semantically rich collections of digital documents. Ontology-based information retrieval systems capture semantic relations for providing value added information services. Deviating from the regular approach of developing ontologies on the basis of domain knowledge, the present paper puts forward a novel method for developing ontologies from the semantic information available in the titles of digital documents. Such an approach gathers significance due to its simplicity in ontology development process. To examine the same, the study considered the case of Agricultural Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) present in Vidyanidhi Digital Library. The study resulted in the development of Indian Agricultural Research domain ontology, which was used for developing ontology-based information retrieval system. This paper while describing the methodology followed for developing the ontology presents the technical details of the developed system.

A Multilingual Multi-script Database of Indian Theses: Implementation of Unicode at Vidyanidhi

The theses submitted to universities are a rich and unique source of information on a given topic in terms of breadth as well as depth of treatment and coverage. The insight into the theoretical and methodological foundations of a topic, the data sets, and the exhaustive bibliography-all these attributes make the doctoral thesis a rich resource. A thesis represents the outcome of a focused and extensive study involving intellectual labour of more than three years. Archiving and enhancing access to theses is the main mission of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) initiatives worldwide. ETDs gracefully overcome many of the problematic issues relating to the archiving and accessing of theses.

A novel reliability scheme employing multiple sink nodes for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) offer tremendous benefits for remote health monitoring and real-time patient care. However, the success of such a system would primarily depend on the reliability of the data transmitted by the WBAN. Two aspects of data reliability need to be considered, namely, data accuracy and data freshness (or, recentness of data). Assuming that the sophistication of the sensors addresses the problem of data accuracy, the freshness of such data becomes crucial. The focus of this work is to ensure reduced delay of communication within the WBAN, thereby reducing the overall network delay, which in turn maintains data freshness at the end point. This paper presents a novel scheme that focuses on reducing packet losses, and hence, the associated delay, to maintain data transmitted by the WBAN as fresh as possible. The paper presents a scheme using multiple sink nodes to achieve the objective. The proposed scheme is validated through simulation analyses.

Editor Networks and Making of a Science: A Social Network Analysis of Digital Libraries Journals

We present here our research findings of the structural features of editorial boards (EB) of leading journals of digital libraries using social network analysis techniques and tools.