Innovation is fundamental to economic growth. To innovate, it is necessary to identify at an early stage technologies that can become the seeds of innovation and to ensure sufficient resources are allocated to such technologies. However, it is very hard to identify technology seeds. Many people in the public and private sectors desire such a forecasting tool. In this research, trends in the number of papers, patents, and newspaper articles were investigated. The research suggested that the number of patents is a more appropriate way to gauge trends than is the number of papers or newspaper articles as trends become evident more quickly in patents. Through further analysis, implications for patent forecasting were derived. These could be a useful guideline for decision makers in the public and private sectors.
We propose a new static-node-assisted routing scheme RDV (Reliable Distance Vector routing) for vehicular networks. In RDV, static nodes located at intersections behave as distance-vector routers to assist packet forwarding, i.e., they exchange messages, compute paths, and help packets travel along the computed forwarding paths to their destinations. To support various practical applications over vehicular networks, RDV provides reliable communications such that the average packet delivery ratio exceeds the preconfigured delivery ratio by creating the necessary number of packet copies sent on the shortest path. Evaluation results show that the proposed scheme provides stably high packet delivery ratio, and outperforms other existing routing schemes in both packet delivery ratio and the number of generated packet copies.
The triage tag is used in Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) to check the priority of patients treatments and conditions. However, it is difficult to grasp a change in the patient's information since it is a paper tag. In this paper, we propose a system using the electronic triage tag (eTriage) that facilitates emergency medical technicians to grasp patients locations and conditions through visualization. This system provides the following three views of the patients information: (1) Inter-site view which shows on a map an overview of the latest status in multiple first-aid stations including the number of technicians and patients of each triage category; (2) Intra-site view which shows detailed status of each first-aid station including the location, triage category, and vital signs of each patient on a 3D map created based on the environment mapping technique; and (3) Individual view which shows vital information of patients on a tablet PC according to its orientation using the augmented reality technique. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the proposed system with some preliminary evaluation results.
When a large-scale disaster strikes, the communications infrastructure is usually unavailable. However, accurate and timely information of the disaster area is important because first responders rely on this information to assess the situation in the affected area and to provide an effective and immediate assistance. In this paper, a data collection method from an area of interest (AoI) within the disaster zone is proposed that uses the mobile phones of the people to serve as sensing nodes. In order for maximum AoI coverage to be achieved while minimizing delay, we propose a disruption tolerant network (DTN)-based data aggregation method. In this method, mobile phone users create messages containing disaster-related information and merge them with their respective coverage areas resulting in a new message with the merged coverage. The merging or aggregation of multiple messages will reduce message size and minimize the overall message collection delay. However, simply merging the messages can result in duplicate counting thus, to prevent this, a Bloom filter is constructed for each message. Also, to reduce further the message delivery time, the expected reaching time of a node to its destination is introduced as a routing metric. Through computer simulation with a real geographical map, the proposed method achieved a 9.7% decrease in information collection delay confirming that the proposed method achieved a smaller delay with a smaller number of total exchanged messages in collecting disaster information covering the AoI than epidemic routing.
Purpose This paper seeks to propose a method of discovering uncommercialized research fronts by comparing scientific papers and patents. A comparative study was performed to measure the semantic similarity between academic papers and patents in order to discover research fronts that do not correspond to any patents. Design/methodology/approach The authors compared structures of citation networks of scientific publications with those of patents by citation analysis and measured the similarity between sets of academic papers and sets of patents by natural language processing. After the documents (papers/patents) in each layer were categorized by a citation‐based method, the authors compared three semantic similarity measurements between a set of academic papers and a set of patents: Jaccard coefficient, cosine similarity of term frequency‐inverse document frequency (tfidf) vector, and cosine similarity of log‐tfidf vector. A case study was performed in solar cells. Findings As a result, the cosine similarity of tfidf was found to be the best way of discovering corresponding relationships. Social implications This proposed approach makes it possible to obtain candidates of unexplored research fronts, where academic researches exist but patents do not. This methodology can be immediately applied to support the decision making of R&D investment by both R&D managers in companies and policy makers in government. Originality/value This paper enables comparison of scientific outcomes and patents in more detail by citation analysis and natural language processing than previous studies which just count the direct linkage from patents to papers.
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be used to provide mobile users temporary infrastructure to use services such as database retrieval service when traditional infrastructure-based networks are unavailable in infrastructure-less situations (e.g. after a destructive disaster like an earthquake). The challenging task in such dynamic environments is how we can improve the service availability. An effective strategy is replicating a service at some nodes distributed across the network. However, service replication can considerably impact the system energy consumption. Since mobile devices have a limited amount of battery, a dynamic and efficient service replication is necessary to support such environments. In this paper, we propose a distributed service replication scheme for achieving high service availability with reasonable energy consumption for MANETs. The proposed method called distributed adaptive service replication (DAR) divides the whole network into disjoint zones of at most 2-hops in diameter and builds a dynamic replication mechanism which puts replicas only in zones with high service demand. Through simulations, we have confirmed that our approach can achieve higher service availability and lower energy consumption than an existing method.
In this paper, we propose a method which efficiently collects, retains and propagates traffic information using inter- vehicle communication with "message ferrying" technique used in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). In the proposed method, we use buses as message ferries which travel along regular routes. In order to improve information propagation efficiency in low- density areas, buses collect as much traffic information as possible from cars in their proximity, and periodically disseminate the collected information to neighboring cars. We have implemented the proposed system on the traffic simulator NETSTREAM and compared information propagation efficiency between our proposed method and a method which uses inter-vehicle communication among only ordinary cars. In the simulation, the proposed method improved the efficiency up to 50%.
