Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2013 Issue 1

While the Internet is continuously growing and unavoidable moving towards an ubiquitous internetworking technology, ranging from casual data exchange, home entertainment, security, military, healthcare, transportation, and business applications, to the Internet of Things (IoT) where anything can communicate anywhere, anytime, there is an increasing and urgent need to define global standards for future Internet architectures as well as service definitions. In the Future, the Internet will perhaps become the most exciting entertainment mean. It is very likely that we would be able to make 3D conferencing at home, using holographic projection, spatial sound and haptic transmission. Further, we may no longer use traditional devices such as laptop and desktop computers and cell phones. Monitors and speakers will be completely different ranging from 3D-glasses and headsets to 3D-contact lenses, and in-ear wireless earphones. Keyboard and mouse will disappear as well and will be replaced by biometrics such as voice, iris and finger print recognition, and movement detection. Many projects are being proposed to support and promote the Internet of Things worldwide, ranging from Initiatives (http://www.iot-i.eu/public), Alliances (http://www.ipso-alliance.org/), Forums (http://www.iot-forum.eu/), Consortiums (http://iofthings.org/), Architectures (http://www.iot-a.eu/), Research Clusters (http://www.internet-of-things-research.eu/), and the list goes on. There is seemingly a race towards the leadership on the Internet of things, to the extent that often, driven by "time-to-market" constraints and business requirements, most proposals made so far fail to consider all facets required to deliver the expected services, and often lead to ambiguous and even contradictory definitions of what the Internet of Things is meant to be. For example, some proposals assimilate IoT to Web 3.0, while others claim it is primarily based on RFID and systems alike. Between web semantics and cognitive radio communications, there is a huge gap that needs to be filled out by adequate communication, security, and application software and hardware. Unfortunately, so far, there is no general consensus on the most suitable underlying technology and applications that will help the Internet of Things become a reality. In this presentation, we describe ten of the most challenging hurdles that IoT actors need to face in order to reach their goals. Among these hurdles, we identify the top-ten issues as 1) how to safely migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 given the proliferation of IPv4 devices, 2) Regulation, Pricing and Neutrality of the Future Internet, 3) OAM tools required for accounting and monitoring Future Internet Services, 4) Future Quality of Service definitions and mechanisms, 5) Reliability of Future Internet Services, 6) Future Security Challenges, 7) Scalability of the Internet of Things with its billions of interworked devices, 8) Future Access (local loop) technologies, 9) Future Transport (long distance) telecommunication technologies, and 10) Future End-user Devices and Applications. We aim to briefly explain and highlight the impact of each one of these issues on the service delivery in the context of the Internet of things. We also intend to describe some existing and promising solutions available so far.

A fundamental component of improving health care quality is to include the patient as a participant in achieving their health goals and making decisions about their care. While many may see clinical information systems as a way to improve communication and track health information for clinicians, the role played by personal health records (PHRs) should not be overlooked in developing a modernized Integrated Health Management system. This presentation will outline the positives and negatives of sharing clinical data between providers and their patients, outline a few PHR functionalities that can support care coordination and health outcomes, and describe the components of a national strategy to support the development of PHRs. A PHR, also referred to as a patient portal, is a system that allows an individual to keep track of their health information. While access to information is important for patients, doctors may feel uncomfortable with the idea of sharing information with their patients in this manner. Alternatively, patients may worry about sharing information they would like to keep private. These concerns can often be controlled with the right policies to prevent unexpected use and sharing of the information such as: * providing data segmentation functionalities that allow patients to share only selected data with certain providers, * sharing items such as medications and test results, but not sharing other information that providers might like to keep private such as "notes". Many PHRs draw information out of an existing clinical information system maintained by the physician. If a patient sees providers over multiple systems, the information can still be difficult to track. The most effective PHR allows data from any system to be included. To increase usefulness, a PHR may also store information that the patient adds themselves and provide tools such as medication reminders. Ideally, if a patient is seeing different doctors, those doctors will have information from everyone on the care team, but this does not always happen. If the patient has access to the information, they can share it with a range of providers- improving care coordination at the point of care, where it matters most. A PHR can be useful to all members of a population, and should be considered when planning a clinical information system implementation strategy. However, because different hospitals may provide different systems, it is helpful to have a government-wide strategy. For example, in the United States the government has developed a lightweight standard technical infrastructure based on secure messaging which is being used to populate PHRs. The government also supports development of governance to outline standard policies that ensure all stakeholders can trust the information in the system. A strategy to coordinate the use of PHRs is envisioned to have potential in a number of areas, from improvements in individual health to leveraging these systems to improve research on quality and health behaviors.

Wireless communications and sensing have become an indispensable part of our daily lives from communications, public service and safety, consumer, industry, sports, gaming and entertainment, asset and inventory management, banking to government and military operations. As communications and sensing are poised to address challenging problems to make our lives even better under environments that can potentially disrupt them, like highly populated urban areas, crowded surroundings, or moving platforms, considerable difficulties emerge that greatly complicate communications and sensing. Significantly improved communication and sensing technologies become absolutely essential to address these challenges. Phased arrays allow RF beams carrying the communication or sensing information to be rapidly steered or intercepted from different angles across areas with particular amplitude profiles electronically, enabling swift single- or multi-point communications or sensing over large areas or across many targets while avoiding potentially disrupting obstacles. They are particularly attractive for creating robust communication links for both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) due to their high directivity and scanning ability. In this talk, we will present a novel millimeter-wave dual-band 44/60 GHz phased-array frontend capable of two-dimensional scanning with orthogonal polarizations. This phased array particularly resolves the "RF signal leakage and isolation dilemma" encountered in the existing phased-array systems. It integrates "electrically" the phased-array functions in two separate millimeter-wave bands into a single phased array operating concurrently in dual-band. These unique features, not achievable with existing millimeter-wave phased arrays, will push the phased-array system performance to a next level, while reducing size and cost, and enhance the capability and applications for wireless communications and sensing, particularly when multifunction, multi-operation, multi-mission over complex environments with miniature systems become essential. This phased array enables vast communication and sensing applications, either communication or sensing or both simultaneously - for instance, concurrent Earth-satellite/inter-satellite communications, high-data-rate WPANs and HDMI, and accurate, high-resolution, enhanced-coverage multi-target sensing.

It is widely known that the state of a patient's coronary heart disease can be better assessed using intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) than with more conventional angiography. Recent work has shown that segmentation and 3D reconstruction of IVUS pull-back sequence images can be used for computational fluid dynamic simulation of blood flow through the coronary arteries. This map of shear stress in the blood vessel walls can be used to predict susceptibility of a region of the arteries to future arteriosclerosis and disease. Manual segmentation of images is time consuming as well as cost prohibitive for routine diagnostic use. Current segmentation algorithms do not achieve a high enough accuracy because of the presence of speckle due to blood flow, relatively low resolution of images and presence of various artifacts including guide-wires, stents, vessel branches, and some other growth or inflammations. On the other hand, the image may be induced with additional blur due to movement distortions, as well as resolution-related mixing of closely resembling pixels thus forming a type of out-of-focus blur.. Robust automated segmentation achieving high accuracy of 95% or above has been elusive despite of work by a large community of researchers in the machine vision field. We propose a comprehensive approach where a multitude of algorithms are applied simultaneously to the segmentation problem. In an initial step, pattern recognition methods are used to detect and localize artifacts. We have achieved a high accuracy of 95% or better in detecting frames with stents and location of guide-wire in a large data-set consisting of 15 pull-back sequences with about 1000 image frames each. Our algorithms for lumen segmentation using spatio-temporal texture detection and active contour models have achieved accuracies approaching 70% in the same data-set which is on the high-side of reported accuracies in the literature. Further work is required to combine these methods to increase segmentation accuracy. One approach we are investigating is to combine algorithms using a meta-algorithmic approach. Each segmentation algorithm computes along with the segmentation a measure of confidence in the segmentation which can be biased on prior information about the presence of artifacts. A meta-algorithm then runs a library of algorithms on a sub-sequence of images to be segmented and chooses the segmentation based on computed confidence measures. Machine learning and testing is performed on a large data base. This research is in collaboration with Brigham and Women Hospital in Boston that provides well over 45,000 frames of data for the study.

The explosive demand for mobile data, predicted to reach a 25 to 50 times increase by 2015, along with expensive data roaming charges, and user expectation to remain continuously connected, are all creating novel challenges for service providers and researchers. A potential approach for solving these problems, is exploiting all communication interfaces available on modern mobile devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. In the solitary form, the goal is to exploit any direct Internet connectivity on any of the available interfaces by distributing application data across them in order to achieve higher throughput, minimize energy consumption, and/or minimize cost. In the collaborative form, the goal is to enable and incentivize mobile devices to utilize their neighbors' under-utilized bandwidth in addition to their own direct Internet connections. Despite today's mobile devices being equipped with multiple interfaces, there has been a high deployment barrier for adopting collaborative multi-interface solutions. In addition, these solutions focus on bandwidth maximization without paying sufficient attention to energy efficiency and effective incentive systems. We present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system that fulfills the following requirements: (1) It is easily deployable by not requiring changes to legacy servers, applications, or network infrastructure (i.e. adding new hardware like proxies and routers). (2) It seamlessly exploits available network interfaces in solitary and collaborative forms. (3) It adapts to real-time Internet characteristics and varying system parameters to achieve efficient utilization of these interfaces. (4) It is equipped with an incentive system that encourages users to share their bandwidth with others. (5) It adopts an optimal multi-objective and multi-modal scheduler that maximizes the overall system throughput, while minimizing cost and energy consumption based on user requirements and system status. (6) It leverages incremental system adoption and deployment to further enhance performance gains. A typical scenario for OSCAR is shown in Figure 1. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) Designing the OSCAR system architecture that fulfills the requirements above. (2) Formulating OSCAR's data scheduler as an optimal multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that takes user requirements, device context information, and application requirements into consideration, while distributing application data across multiple local and neighboring devices interfaces. (3) Developing the OSCAR communication protocol that implements our proposed credit-based incentive system, and enables secure communication between the collaborating nodes and the OSCAR enabled servers. We evaluate OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare the results to the optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy consumption rates. The OSCAR system, including its communication protocol, is implemented over the Click Modular Router framework in order to demonstrate its ease of deployment. Our results, which are verified via NS2 simulations, show that with no changes to current Internet architectures, OSCAR reaches the throughput upper-bound. It also provides up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current Operating Systems without changes to legacy servers. Our results also demonstrate OSCAR's ability to maintain cost and the energy consumption levels in the user-defined acceptable ranges.

Machine Translation (MT) which has been championed as an effective technology for knowledge transfer from English to languages with less digital content. An example of such efforts is the automatic translation of English Wikipedia to languages with smaller collections, such as Arabic. However, MT quality is still far from ideal for many of the languages and text genres. While translating a document, many sentences are poorly translated which can provide an incorrect text, and confuse the reader. Moreover, some of these sentences are not as informative and could be summarized to make a more cohesive document. Thus, for tasks in which complete translation is not mandatory, MT can be effective if the system can provide an informative subset of the content with higher translation quality. For this scenario, text summarization can provide effective support for MT by keeping only the most important and informative parts of a given document to translate. In this work, we demonstrate a framework of MT and text summarization which replaces the baseline translation with a proper summary that has higher translation quality than the full translation. For this, we combine the state of the art English summarization system and a novel framework for prediction of MT quality without references. Our framework is composed of the following major components: (a) a standard machine translation system, (b) a reference-free MT quality estimation system, (c) an MT-aware summarization system, and (d) an English-Arabic sentence matcher. More specifically, our English-Arabic system reads in an English document along with its baseline Arabic translation and outputs, as a summary, a subset of the Arabic sentences based on their informativeness and their translation quality. We demonstrate the utility of our system by evaluating it with respect to its translation and summarization quality and demonstrate that we can balance between improving MT quality and maintaining a decent summarization quality. For summarization, we conduct both reference-based and reference-free evaluations and observe a performance in the range of the state of the art system. Moreover, the translation quality of the summaries shows an important improvement against the baseline translation of the entire documents. This MT-aware summarization approach can be applied to translation of texts such as Wikipedia articles. For such domain-rich articles, there is a large variation of translation quality across different sections. An intelligent reduction of the translation tasks results in improved final outcome. Finally, the framework is mostly language independent and can be easily customized for different target languages and domains.

Silicon-based Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) hardware is the backbone of advanced wireless communication and sensing systems, enabling low-cost, small-size, and high-performance single-chip solution. Advanced RF wireless systems and in turn, silicon RFICs, are relevant not only to commercial and military applications, but also to national infrastructures. This importance is even more pronounced as the development of civilian technologies becomes increasingly important to the national economic growth. New applications utilizing silicon RFIC technologies continue to emerge - spanning across spectrums - from ultra-wideband to millimeter-wave and submillimeter-wave ultra-high-capacity wireless communications; from sensing for airport security and inventory for gas and oil; and from detection and inspection of buried underground oil and gas pipes to wireless power transmission and data communications for smart wells. In this talk, we will present some of our recent developments of silicon RFICs for advanced wireless communications and sensing.

Smart phones are becoming dominant handsets that are available to wireless technology users. Wireless access to internet is also becoming the default scenario with vast majority of internet users. The increasing demand for high speed wireless internet services makes current technologies meet their limit due to channel impairments. The conventional adaptive modulation technique (CAMT) is no longer helpful due to high data rate requirements of new technologies and wireless video streaming in addition to other applications such as downloading large files. The CAMT is one of the developed approaches that are considered a powerful techniques that are currently being used in advanced wireless communication systems such as long term evolution (LTE) technology. This technique is used to enhance energy efficiency and increase spectral efficiency of wireless communication systems over fading channels. The CAMT dynamically changes modulation schemes based on channel conditions to maximize throughput with minimum bit error rate (BER) based on channel state information of each user, which is sent back to transmitter by receiver side via reliable channel. The CAMT is based on predefined set of ranges signal to noise ratios (SNRs) for different orders of modulation schemes. The more increase in SNRs lead to higher level of ranges of SNRs set that lead to a higher modulation order. This will allow to higher transmission speed utilizing the good channel condition. In order to minimize BER, when channel condition degrades, modulation order is reduced, which result to lower spectral efficiency but more robust modulation scheme. The dynamicity of changing modulation order based on SNRs ranges of radio channel is the key part of CAMT to increase throughput and minimize the BER. However, this work proposes an advance in AMT that is based on utilizing more channel state information in addition to SNR ranges. The particular new information is related to how sever fading the channel experiences. The amount of severity in this work is measured with amount of fading (AF), which is computed by using the first and second central moments of envelope amplitude. This additional information helps to distinguish between different channel conditions that have same average set of SNR ranges but different levels of fading severity that may be utilized to increase performance of CAMT. The different levels of fading severity and similar sets of SNR ranges have been tested with Nakagami-m fading channels. The AF measure of fading severity is equal to 1/m in this radio fading channels. So, the investigation in this work is based on testing how to leverage the AF dimension in addition to the conventional approach used in CAMT. In this work we show that the BER of different modulation schemes depends on fading amount for every range of SNR defined by sets of AMT. Current results show dramatic improvements in BER performance and throughput when AF is leveraged with SNRs range set approach defined in CAMT. Utilization of AF with SNR ranges allow adapting higher modulation order in channel conditions that were not possible with conventional AMT.

Abstract Objectives in this research is to increase the accuracy of the distinction between functions of various Kulaip through a careful analysis of brain electrical signals and electrical signals are out of the brain and can be received from sensors, especially in plants and solid enlarge and stored. It is characteristic of brain signals Abbaas Electrical signals are weak force and the Pacific area affected by humans, so it is also loaded with signal noise changed from its true value. Of my goals in this research is to arrive to delete possible from the noise signal from the brain signals Electrical and represented in a precise manner by factors and components unique to each signal and then train the system to these signals and it means the function of certain mental, and after the training system signals available for training begin the testing phase where the system will signal a new mentality, including the system by comparing the store to his posts, and then classified into one of mental functions that are stored for him. I have in this research to distinguish between five mental functions are: Baseline task1-when a person is completely relaxed in the case of Multiplication task2-mind when it calculates the multiplication operation is not simple Letter composing task3-imagine when the person writing and the formation of a character in his mind Rotation task4-When the person imagine a three-dimensional model of rotation around the axis Counting task 5 - when you imagine the person that writes numbers in sequence This means that one of the 83.7813% and thank God I was able to distinguish the origin of the five functions correctly by the health 100 electrical signal to the brain can identify correctly the 84 signal and we determine the brain function that she made this reference. There are high hopes might build on this research where possible to increase the number of functions of the mind which distinguishes them we reach the distinction between all functions of the mind and know what to think of human, and also the feelings, and also of the objectives of this research is to try to help people with special needs through know what is going on in their minds and meet their needs. I hope to benefit from this research all interested in this area and reach a new height in the analysis and understanding of the functions of the human mind and offer all support to fellow human with special needs.

Concurrent multiband receivers receive and process multiple frequency bands simultaneously. They are thus capable of providing multitask or multifunction to meet consumer needs in modern wireless communications. Concurrent multiband receivers require at least some of their components to operate concurrently at different frequency bands which results in substantial reduction of cost and power dissipation. Fig. 1 shows a simplified concurrent multiband receiver, typically consisting of an off-chip antenna and on-chip low-noise amplifier (LNA) and mixer. While the mixer can be designed as a multiband or wideband component, the LNA should perform as a concurrent multiband device and hence requires proper input matching to the antenna, low noise figure (NF), high gain and high linearity to handle multiple input signals simultaneously. Therefore, the design of concurrent multiband LNA's is the most critical issue for implementation of fully integrated low-cost and low-power concurrent multi-band receivers. In this talk, we present a 13/24/35-GHz concurrent tri-band LNA implementing a novel tri-band load composed of two feedback notch filters. The tri-band load is composed of two passive LC notch filters with feedback. The tri-band LNA fabricated on a 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS process achieves power gain of 22.3/24.6/22.2 dB at 13.5/24.5/34.5 GHz, respectively. It has the best noise figure of 3.7/3.3/4.3 dB and IIP3 of -17.5/-18.5/-15.6 dBm in the 13.5/24.5/34.5 GHz pass-band, respectively. The tri-band LNA consumes 36 mW from a 1.8 V supply, and occupies 920 μm × 500 μm.