ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

Introduction. This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the effects of Facebook usage by undergraduate students at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. The proposed research model tests the perceived effect of personality traits, self-regulation, and trust on students' achievements. On the basis of flow theory, the model suggests negative mediating effects of the use of and cognitive absorption on Facebook; it leads to a decrease in students' academic performance but a positive effect on satisfaction with life that limits the undesirable effect.

Introduction. This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the effects of Facebook usage by undergraduate students at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. The proposed research model tests the perceived effect of personality traits, self-regulation, and trust on students’ achievements. On the basis of flow theory, the model suggests negative mediating effects of the use of and cognitive absorption on Facebook; it leads to a decrease in students’ academic performance but a positive effect on satisfaction with life that limits the undesirable effect.Method. Data from paper-and-pencil surveys with 239 undergraduate students from Luleå University of Technology were used to test the model. SmartPLS software was employed to test the proposed structural equation model.Results. The results indicate that extensive use of Facebook by students with extraverted personalities leads to poor academic performance. However, students who are more self-regulated control their presence on these p...

Increasing Green House Effect and reducing fuel storage of planet contributed highly due to automobile industry drives an alarming situation for researcher to look for alternative options for future generation vehicle. Tesla, Mahindra-eco and other automobile companies have already come up with concept of e-vehicle whose soul is battery and brain is Battery Management Unit. Our proposed design embodied SOC-ASIC (State-of-Charge-Application Specific Integrated Circuit) design for SOC (State-of-Charge) estimation of Series-connected Li-ion Battery cell used to build battery pack of hybrid or all-electric vehicles. It consists of high precision Array of dedicated instrumentation amplifier circuit which connects output voltage of terminal across each individual cell to ADC via array of switching network. Array of switching network consists of low power, low loss, and low threshold voltage switches driven by output of de-multiplexer circuit whose select lines controls from General Purpose Input-Output (GPIO) pins of microcontroller. Signal voltage after switching network process with Noise filter and Kalman filter to produce accurate and precise terminal voltage to ADC.

Cloud Computing is high utility software having the ability to change the IT software industry and making the software even more attractive. It has also changed the way IT companies used to buy and design hardware. The elasticity of resources without paying a premium for large scale is unprecedented in the history of IT industry. The increase in web traffic and different services are increasing day by day making load balancing a big research topic. Cloud computing is a new technology which uses virtual machine instead of physical machine to host, store and network the different components. Load balancers are used for assigning load to different virtual machines in such a way that none of the nodes gets loaded heavily or lightly. The load balancing needs to be done properly because failure in any one of the node can lead to unavailability of data.

The whole finance of the world revolves around currency. It may be physical or digital. Currency functions as a unit of account providing a common measure of goods and services being exchanged. The enormous use of paper currency has resulted in deforestation, which is leading to ecological imbalance. For conserving the space, time, and environment there is a need for an alternative currency. In this paper, ubiquitous virtual money is proposed, which is accessible throughout the environment. Ubiquitous currency is a form of electronic money that is spent like pocket change. The transactions can be made secure by the use of biometric identifiers. Keywords—ubiquitous, virtual money, banking, smart money, trackable money.

Cloud Computing is high utility software having the ability to change the IT software industry and making the software even more attractive. It has also changed the way IT companies used to buy and design hardware. The elasticity of resources without paying a premium for large scale is unprecedented in the history of IT industry. The increase in web traffic and different services are increasing day by day making load balancing a big research topic. Cloud computing is a new technology which uses virtual machine instead of physical machine to host, store and network the different components. Load balancers are used for assigning load to different virtual machines in such a way that none of the nodes gets loaded heavily or lightly. The load balancing needs to be done properly because failure in any one of the node can lead to unavailability of data.

The Steiner minimum tree (SMT) problem is one of the classic nonlinear combinatorial optimization problems for centuries. The Steiner tree problem finds the minimum cost tree connecting a given set of nodes called required nodes in a given undirected weighted graph. In this minimum cost Steiner tree due to the reduction of path-cost, some nonrequired nodes are also used while finding the SMT, which are called Steiner nodes. The Steiner path problem comes from the Steiner tree problem of finding the minimum cost path connecting a given set of nodes called required nodes in a given undirected weighted graph. The Steiner path problem can be characterized as either a decision or optimization problem. This paper focuses on solving the Steiner path as a decision problem. The Steiner Path decision problem finds whether there is a path connecting a given set of nodes called required nodes in a given binary tree. The decision that whether there exists a Steiner path or not can help in furthe...

This assignment addresses two important questions and one minor. The major ones would be how Constantinople and the Western Roman Empire was partly responsible for the fall of the city? Second would be the why the Ottomans were so driven to conquer this city? The final inquiry would be the relation between the Ottomans and the Khilafat movement in 20th century.

The report undertakes the assignment of reviewing the working and advancements of quantum cascade lasers. The report provides a brief introduction to the study project followed by some discussion over the related research papers. The report encompasses a brief literature review of the research papers with references. Personal understanding has also been provided when where necessary. The paper discusses the self-consistent solutions of intersub-band rate equations in quantum cascade lasers. It discusses the feedback methods put to practice in maximizing the gain to the desired frequency. The report briefly explains the distributed feedback quantum cascade laser and the external cavity quantum cascade laser. Towards the end the report provides an introduction to the current density inside a quantum cascade laser and shows that for high gain the current density is limited by the lifetime of the excited state. The paper finally discusses in detail the solution to rate equation of a Quantum cascade laser. It enlists all the assumptions made in the process and the displays the results achieved towards the end.

Traditionally, heuristic methods are used to generate candidates for large scale recommender systems. Model-based candidate generation promises multiple potential advantages, primarily that we can explicitly optimize the same objective as the downstream ranking model. However, large scale model-based candidate generation approaches suffer from dataset bias problems caused by the infeasibility of obtaining representative data on very irrelevant candidates. Popular techniques to correct dataset bias, such as inverse propensity scoring, do not work well in the context of candidate generation. We first explore the dynamics of the dataset bias problem and then demonstrate how to use random sampling techniques to mitigate it. Finally, in a novel application of fine-tuning, we show performance gains when applying our candidate generation system to Twitter’s home timeline.

While most autonomous driving efforts reported are directed for general driving and mainly on major roads, there are numerous applications for autonomous vehicles for last mile mobility-from person mobility and mail delivery to flexible recharging of cars in parking structures. Over the last year, we have designed vehicles for the micro-mobility challenge. Our approach was based on adoption of the open source Autoware system. The system was taken as a starting point for the design of a robust solution. Proposed requirements include a robust control design, a shift towards increased use of image data over LiDAR data, handling of a richer set of vehicles / pedestrians in a last mile scenario, and overall system characterization and evaluation. We present an overview of the overall design and the design decisions for construction of vehicles for last-mile delivery.

This paper shows a framework of the different techniques for the design of the planning and governing components, implementation, Evolution and execution of an intelligent manufacturing system. Architecture of a modern manufacturing industry is presented, which makes possible to create specific manufactrons system for the specific tasks, depending on the self-operated analysis of its essential characteristics. The manufactronic industry concept helps in the integration of intelligence and to increase flexibility at the maximum level of the manufacturing system as well as at the minimum level of the particular machine. This concept is implemented & demonstrated in the automobile and aeronautical industries, but can be simply applied to nearly all manufacturing industries. Implementation of manufactronic techniques in the industries helps to forecast and to fulfill the rapidly varying customer requirements, to produce high quality products in sufficient quantities with reduction in costs. The Modern Intelligence Technologies are also presented in this paper.

Due to variety of materials available to any designer for a particular application, there is a need for a proper technique to select. This paper focuses on the optimum selection of materials for electrostatic microactuators using Ashby approach. In this work, performance indices and material indices have been developed for electrostatic actuators and thereafter material selection chart is plotted. The selection chart shows that for high actuation voltage and high actuation force, diamond is the best possible candidate followed by silicon carbide and silicon nitride. On the other hand, if high speed electrostatic actuator is desired, then aluminum is the best possible candidate followed by nickel and copper.

Precise payload positioning by an overhead crane is dif£cult due to the fact that the payload can exhibit a pendulum-like swinging motion. Motivated by the desire to achieve fast and precise payload positioning while minimizing swinging motion, several researchers have developed various controllers for overhead crane systems. In this paper, we apply a controller design technique called interconnection and damping assignment-passivity based control (IDA-PBC), that achieves stabilization for underactuated mechanical systems invoking the physically motivated principles of energy shaping and damping injection. The system of interest in this paper constitutes a special class of nonlinear underactuated mechanical systems with holonomic constraints. The holonomic constraint here restricts the motion of the system to a smooth hypersurface determined by the initial overhang of the cable.

Passivity based controllers are known to provide robust stability for inherently passive dynamic systems. Recently, with the development of "passification" techniques, these controllers are also shown to be effective in robust stabilization of non-passive systems. However, the robustness of stability in this case depends on the robustness of passification. The frequency domain sufficient conditions also exist in the literature for checking robustness of passification. This paper presents new conditions for robust passification using different norm-bounded uncertainty models. In particular, the coprime factor uncertainty models are considered and corresponding robust passification conditions are presented.

A controllable series device (CSD) is used to damp the transient oscillations in a power system. The power system studied here is the single machine infinite bus (SMIB) and the CSD used is a controllable series capacitor (CSC). Interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA PBC) is used for controller synthesis. The SMIB system is described with two different types of models -the second order swing equation model and the classical third order flux decay model. For the second order model the control objective of damping assignment as well as energy shaping is achieved. In case of the third order model the control objective is just damping injection.

A stability result based on the Immersion and Invariance control strategy is derived for a class of systems described by differential equations with algebraic constraints. The result is then applied to synthesize a stabilizing control law for a two machine electrical power system with a controllable series capacitor (CSC). The dynamics of the two-machine system is given by differential equations and the active power balance at the load buses is given by algebraic equations. The CSC dynamics is described by a first order differential equation.