Ashraf Uddin

Vivek Kumar Singh, Parveen Arora, Ashraf Uddin et al.

During the last two decades, India has emerged as a major knowledge producer in the world, however different reports put it at different ranks, varying from 3rd to 9th places. The recent commissioned study reports of Department of Science and Technology (DST) done by Elsevier and Clarivate Analytics, rank India at 5thand 9th places, respectively. On the other hand, an independent report by National Science Foundation (NSF) of United States (US), ranks India at 3rd place on research output in Science and Engineering area. Interestingly, both, the Elsevier and the NSF reports use Scopus data, and yet surprisingly their outcomes are different. This article, therefore, attempts to investigate as to how the use of same database can still produce different outcomes, due to differences in methodological approaches. The publication counting method used and the subject selection approach are the two main exogenous factors identified to cause these variations. The implications of the analytical outcomes are discussed with special focus on policy perspectives.

Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan et al.

We design a system, SolarGest, which can recognize hand gestures near a solar-powered device by analyzing the patterns of the photocurrent. SolarGest is based on the observation that each gesture interferes with incident light rays on the solar panel in a unique way, leaving its distinguishable signature in harvested photocurrent. Using solar energy harvesting laws, we develop a model to optimize design and usage of SolarGest. To further improve the robustness of SolarGest under non-deterministic operating conditions, we combine dynamic time warping with Z-score transformation in a signal processing pipeline to pre-process each gesture waveform before it is analyzed for classification. We evaluate SolarGest with both conventional opaque solar cells as well as emerging see-through transparent cells. Our experiments with 6,960 gesture samples for 6 different gestures reveal that even with transparent cells, SolarGest can detect 96% of the gestures while consuming 44% less power compared to light sensor based systems.