Age of Information for Short-Packet Covert Communication with Time Modulated Retrodirective Array

In this paper,the covert age of information(CAoI),which characterizes the timeliness and covertness performance of communication,is first investigated in the short-packet covert communication with time modulated retrodirective array(TMRDA).Specifically,the TMRDA is designed to maximize the antenna gain in the target direction while the side lobe is sufficiently suppressed.On this basis,the covertness constraint and CAoI are derived in closed form.To facilitate the covert transmission design,the transmit power and block-length are jointly optimized to minimize the CAoI,which demonstrates the trade-off between covertness and timelessness.Our results illustrate that there exists an optimal block-length that yields the minimum CAoI,and the presented optimization results can achieve enhanced performance compared with the fixed block-length case.Additionally,we observe that smaller beam pointing error at Bob leads to improvements in CAoI.

Age of Information Based User Scheduling and Data Assignment in Multi-User Mobile Edge Computing Networks:An Online Algorithm

This paper investigates the age of information(AoI)-based multi-user mobile edge computing(MEC)network with partial offloading mode.The weighted sum AoI(WSA)is first analyzed and derived,and then a WSA minimization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the user scheduling and data assignment.Due to the non-analytic expression of the WSA w.r.t.the optimization variables and the unknowability of future network information,the problem cannot be solved with known solution methods.Therefore,an online Joint Partial Offloading and User Scheduling Optimization(JPOUSO)algorithm is proposed by transforming the original problem into a single-slot data assignment subproblem and a single-slot user scheduling sub-problem and solving the two sub-problems separately.We analyze the computational complexity of the presented JPO-USO algorithm,which is of O(N),with N being the number of users.Simulation results show that the proposed JPO-USO algorithm is able to achieve better AoI performance compared with various baseline methods.It is shown that both the user’s data assignment and the user’s AoI should be jointly taken into account to decrease the system WSA when scheduling users.

Minimizing Age of Information in the Uplink Multi-User Networks via Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation

Improving the information freshness is critical for the monitoring and controlling applications in the cellular Internet of Things(IoT).In this paper,we are interested in optimizing the bandwidth allocation dynamically to improve the information freshness of the short packet based uplink status updates,which is characterized by a recently proposed metric,age of information(Ao I).We first design a status update scheme with channel distribution information(CDI).By relaxing the hard bandwidth constraint and introducing a Lagrangian multiplier,we first decouple the multi-MTCD bandwidth allocation problem into a single MTCD Markov decision process(MDP).Under the MDP framework,after variable substitution,we obtain the single-MTCD status update scheme by solving a linear programming problem.Then,we adjust the Lagrangian multiplier to make the obtained scheme satisfy the relaxed bandwidth constraint.Finally,a greedy policy is built on the proposed scheme to adjust the bandwidth allocation in each slot to satisfy the hard bandwidth constraint.In the unknown environment without CDI,we further design a bandwidth allocation scheme which only maximizes the expected sum Ao I drop within each time slot.Simulation results show that in terms of AoI,the proposed schemes outperform the benchmark schemes.

Information freshness optimization of multiple status update streams in Internet of things:Generation rate control and service rate reservation

The Internet of things(IoT)has become a key infrastructure providing up-to-date and fresh information for policy analysis and decision-making of upper-layer applications.However,there are limited sensing and communication resources in IoT devices,which significantly affects the timeliness and freshness of the updated status.This work proposes two schemes,namely,the generation rate control and service rate reservation schemes,to improve the overall information freshness of multiple status update streams at the receiver.Specifically,using the recently proposed Age of Information(AoI)as the metric for evaluating information freshness,we characterized the overall information freshness,i.e.,the overall average AoI at the receiver for both schemes,by considering the urgency difference of status update and streams.Both schemes for status updates and streams,respectively,were formulated as two optimization problems.We proved that both problems are convex and the optimal generation and service rates for different streams are found by the standard convex optimization algorithm.Moreover,we proposed both approximate optimal generation and approximate optimal service rate for fast deployment in heavy and light load cases.Numerical results verify the theoretical findings and accuracy of the proposed approximate solutions,guiding the design and deployment of IoT.

Digitalization is a bridge for TCM striding towards information age

Digitalization is a bridge for traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)striding towards information age.Application of digital technologies such as computers and mathematical statistics methods has played a revolutionary role in TCM diagnosis and syndrome standardization studies.

Verifying the Effects of an Education Program Leveraging Information Technology to Promote Cervical Cancer Screening in Women Aged 20 - 29—A One-Year Longitudinal Study

The purpose of this research is to implement an IT-based education program in order to promote cervical cancer screenings for women aged 20 - 29 years, as well as to examine the results of said program. This is a longitudinal/comparative study of two groups, one for which the program was implemented (the intervention group), and the other for which it was not (the control group). The program consisted of attending a health lecture and encouragement to be screened one month, six months, and one year later sent through IT-based methods. The target was unmarried women aged 20 - 29 who had neither previously given birth nor had been screened for cervical cancer in a period one year prior. They were divided into two groups, the intervention group (n = 142) and control group (n = 145). The effectiveness of the program was assessed via an initial survey and further surveys six months and one year later. Results were based on the Japanese version of the Health Belief Model Scale for Cervical Cancer and the Pap Smear Test (HBMSCCPST), knowledge scores in the categories of Healthy Lifestyles, Cervical Cancer, Cervical Cancer Screening, and screening behavior. A two-way ANOVA of the HBMSCCPST subscales and knowledge scores in the initial, six-month, and one-year surveys was performed, showing interaction in Cervical Cancer (p = 0.00). Main effects were observed in Cervical Cancer Screening (p = 0.00) and Healthy Lifestyles (p = 0.00). Regarding the amount of change from the initial survey, knowledge scores in the Cervical Cancer (p = 0.027) and Cervical Cancer Screening (p = 0.016) categories were significantly higher in the intervention group than in the control group. There was no significant difference in cervical cancer screening rates (p = 0.26) between the two groups. However, a small-degree effect size was observed for Benefits, Seriousness, and Susceptibility subscales in both examinees and non-examinees. Although the educational program of this study was effective in improving the knowledge of women in their twenties, there was little improvement in HBMSCCPST and it did not lead to the promotion of cervical cancer screening. In order to raise interest in cervical cancer screening, it is necessary to consider useful content to guide women to consult with healthcare professionals, a long-term population approach, and organizational structure of consultation.

A Probe into the Application Ability of College English Teachers’ Educational Information Technology in the Information Age

With the arrival of the age of large information data, the education also gradually tends to educate the information, which has forced the demand of the teachers’ educational information technology application ability of the major universities and universities to be higher and higher. Therefore, in order to meet the needs of the development of higher education in the information age and to meet the needs of the college English teaching innovation, this paper will explore the application ability of the educational information technology of the college English teachers from various angles.

Information Privacy, Data Surveillance and Security——How Australian Privacy Law Fully Plays Its Role in the Age of Big Data

Privacy and the protection of privacy is a common topic studied by many scholars. From the very beginning of human culture, people have personal privacy, which is not willing for them to be unveiled by others. With the development of information technology, especially the internet, knowledge and information are dealt by internet users in conscious or unconscious way, and personal information has been rapidly and quickly distributed and disseminated all over the world. Personal data can be collected by hackers or interlinks from the website, internet not only provides people an era with internet links, but also an age with information collections, a big data age. With the background of big data, this essay tries to put forward the correlative relationship between the protection of information privacy and the privacy law in Australia. It ??rst has an overview of the concepts of information privacy and data surveillance under the background of big data, then highlights the importance of data security in the age of big data;with a literature review on the development of Australian privacy acts, it further claims that privacy acts or regulations by the federal or states provided strong support for the protection of personal data. Then relationship between the protection information privacy and the need of judicial guarantee is further studied for thorough methods or regimes in data protection. With these points studied, this essay aims to highlight the importance of data protection and information privacy. On the other hand, it aims to provide awareness for readers the vital role privacy laws can play in the protection of people’s personal information and emphases the importance of a continuous evolution for privacy law system in the age of big data.

New Copyright Challenges and Opportunities for Academic Librarians in Hong Kong in the Digital Information Age

1 Introduction High-speed networking can now deliver Information tomillions of users in seconds.Users In turn can download thedata in electronic format or just print them out with a fewstrokes of the keyboard.The data can be easily saved,reorganized and modified electronocally.While informationtechnology provides fast and easy ways to distributeinformation,it also presents challenges.Easy access tocopyrighted materials is resulting in the unauthorizedreproduction of all kinds of information,forcing info...

Impact of the World's New Technological Revolution on Economic Development and Educational Reform in the Information Age

The fourth industrial revolution of human society is also known as the"world's new technological revolution,"which has brought human society into the information age and has had an extremely important impact on economic development and educational reform.In the information age,economic development and wealth creation are dominated by the acquisition,mastery,distribution,and utilization of information instead of capital.Therefore,the cultivation of talents is very important,and educational reform is imperative with the rise of the world's new technological revolution.

Impact of the World’s New Technological Revolution on Economic Development and Educational Reform in the Information Age

The fourth industrial revolution of human society is also known as the“world’s new technological revolution,”which has brought human society into the information age and has had an extremely important impact on economic development and educational reform.In the information age,economic development and wealth creation are dominated by the acquisition,mastery,distribution,and utilization of information instead of capital.Therefore,the cultivation of talents is very important,and educational reform is imperative with the rise of the world’s new technological revolution.

Preliminary Analysis of the Protection of Privacy in the Information Network Age

The development and appli- cation of modern computer information and network technology is a double- edged sword. On the one hand, thanks to the rapid and convenient spread and exchange of computer- ized information and the compressed time and space on the Internet, computerized information plays a positive role in many areas like the economy, culture, education, sci- ence and technology, and politics. On the other hand, it also leads to various online rights infringements： citizens＇ individual information is revealed online; personal comput- ers are hacked; and online shopping lists are copied. Many Internet users worry about these problems to some extent. Especially in recent years, as information technology has devel- oped rapidly, people＇s online privacy rights have faced unprecedented challenges. How to strengthen pro- tection of online individual privacy has become an important challenge to the healthy development of informa- tion networks.

Age-of-information-aware PI controller for load frequency control

Open communication system in modern power systems brings concern about information staleness which may cause power system frequency instability.The information staleness is often characterized by communication delay.However,communication delay is a packet-centered metric and cannot reflect the requirement of information freshness for load frequency control(LFC).This paper introduces the age of information(AoI),which is more compre-hensive and informative than the conventional communication delay modeling method.An LFC controller and com-munication are integrated into the design for LFC performance improvement.An AoI-aware LFC model is formulated first,and considering each allowable update period of the smart sensor,different AoI-aware PI controllers are then designed according to the exponential decay rate.The right AoI-aware controller and update period are selected according to the degree of frequency fluctuation of the power system.Case studies are carried out on one-area and two-area power systems.The results show the superior performance of the AoI-aware controllers in comparison to the delay-dependent controllers.

Age of Transmission-Optimal Scheduling for State Update of Multi-Antenna Cellular Internet of Things

Timely information updates are critical for real-time monitoring and control applications in the Internet of Things(IoT). In this paper, we consider a multi-antenna cellular IoT for state update where a base station(BS) collects information from randomly distributed IoT nodes through time-varying channel.Specifically, multiple IoT nodes are allowed to transmit their state update simultaneously in a spatial multiplex manner. Inspired by age of information(AoI),we introduce a novel concept of age of transmission(AoT) for the sceneries in which BS cannot obtain the generation time of the packets waiting to be transmitted. The deadline-constrained AoT-optimal scheduling problem is formulated as a restless multi-armed bandit(RMAB) problem. Firstly, we prove the indexability of the scheduling problem and derive the closed-form of the Whittle index. Then, the interference graph and complementary graph are constructed to illustrate the interference between two nodes. The complete subgraphs are detected in the complementary graph to avoid inter-node interference. Next, an AoT-optimal scheduling strategy based on the Whittle index and complete subgraph detection is proposed.Finally, numerous simulations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed strategy.

Method to Evaluate the Location of Aged Care Facilitiesin Urban Areas Focusing on the Equity in Terms ofUsers’Accessibility

The present study developed and tested a method to evaluate the location of aged care facilities from the viewpoint of whether they are equitably located for users,using the improved Median Share Ratio(MSR).By evaluating the current location of aged care facilities,it is possible to extract the districts which are short of facilities.The evaluation method was applied to Chofu and Kiyose Cities in Tokyo Metropolis,Japan,and the evaluation result of weighting and that of not weighting by elderly population were compared and discussed.Consequently,adopting the evaluation method with weighting by elderly population,it is possible to adequately examine the districts where new aged care facilities should be constructed.From this evidence,it is significant to evaluate the location of aged care facilities,using the improved MSR with weighting by elderly population in the study.

Phenomenological Models of the Global Demographic Dynamics and Their Usage for Forecasting in 21st Century

A great discovery made by H. von Foerster, P. M. Mora and L. W. Amiot was published in a 1960 issue of “Science”. The authors showed that existing data for calculating the Earth’s population in the new era (from 1 to 1958) could be described with incredibly high proximity by a hyperbolic function with the point of singularity on 13 November 2026. Thus, empirical regularity of the rise of the human population was established, which was marked by explosive demographic growth in the 20th century when during only one century it almost quadrupled: from 1.656 billion in 1900 to 6.144 billion in 2000. Nowadays, the world population has already overcome 7.8 billion people. Immediately after 1960, an active search for phenomenological models began to explain the mechanism of the hyperbolic population growth and the following demographic transition designed to stabilize its population. A significant role in explaining the mechanism of the hyperbolic growth of the world population was played by S. Kuznets (1960) and E. Boserup (1965), who found out that the rates of technological progress historically increased in proportion to the Earth’s population. It meant that the growth of the population led to raising the level of life-supporting technologies, and the latter in its turn enlarged the carrying capacity of the Earth, making it possible for the world population to expand. Proceeding from the information imperative, we have developed the model of the demographic dynamics for the 21st century for the first time. The model shows that with the development and spread of Intelligent Machines (IM), the number of the world population reaching a certain maximum will then irreversibly decline. Human depopulation will largely touch upon the most developed countries, where IM is used intensively nowadays. Until a certain moment in time, this depopulation in developed countries will be compensated by the explosive growth of the population in African countries located south of the Sahara. Calculations in our model reveal that the peak of the human population of 8.52 billion people will be reached in 2050, then it will irreversibly go down to 7.9 billion people by 2100, if developed countries do not take timely effective measures to overcome the process of information depopulation.

Freshness constraints of an age of information based event-triggered Kalman consensus filter algorithm over a wireless sensor network

This paper presents the design of a new event-triggered Kalman consensus filter(ET-KCF)algorithm for use over a wireless sensor network(WSN).This algorithm is based on information freshness,which is calculated as the age of information(Aol)of the sampled data.The proposed algorithm integrates the traditional event-triggered mechanism,information freshness calculation method,and Kalman consensus filter(KCF)algorithm to estimate the concentrations of pollutants in the aircraft more efficiently.The proposed method also considers the influence of data packet loss and the aircraft's loss of communication path over the WSN,and presents an Aol-freshness-based threshold selection method for the ET-KCF algorithm,which compares the packet Aol to the minimum average Aol of the system.This method can obviously reduce the energy consumption because the transmission of expired information is reduced.Finally,the convergence of the algorithm is proved using the Lyapunov stability theory and matrix theory.Simulation results show that this algorithm has better fault tolerance compared to the existing KCF and lower power consumption than other ET-KCFs.

Timely Updates in MEC-Assisted Status Update Systems: Joint Task Generation and Computation Offloading Scheme

Fresh status updates are vital to the efficient operation of network monitoring and real-time control applications. In this paper, we consider a mobile edge computing(MEC)-assisted status update system, where smart devices extract valuable status updates from sensed data to achieve timely awareness of the surroundings by exploiting computational resources at the device and edge server. To quantify the freshness of status updates obtained by executing computation tasks, we employ the concept of age of information(Ao I) to characterize the timeliness of status updates. To cope with the limited energy at devices, we investigate a joint task generation and computation offloading scheme under a given energy budget for minimizing the age of obtained status updates. The age minimization problem is modeled as a constrained Markov decision process(CMDP). To obtain the optimal policy, we derive the structural properties of the optimal deterministic policy and propose a lightweight structure-based status update algorithm in the case of known channel statistics. Moreover, we consider a more realistic scenario without prior knowledge of channel statistics, and propose a Q-learning-based status update algorithm to make online decisions. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed algorithms is competitive when compared with existing schemes.

Philosophical Reflection Over the Origin of the Universe

The world today is in urgent need to unveil the Truth of the Universe to guide the future of humankind.This paper serves as an introductory work to the author’s forthcoming book Revelation and Reflection on Mankind by Modern Physics that examines great recent discoveries in physics and analyzes how it could be linked to philosophical ideologies passed down throughout history from the Axial Age,especially the Eastern philosophical thoughts.This paper also proposes a new cosmic model as a reference for the philosophy and science communities.Finally,this paper advocates for more attention on the Origin of philosophy.

The impact of social capital on children's (6–12) use of ICT in urban communities: A field survey from Zhengzhou City, Henan Province

Purpose： This paper focuses on the impact of social capital on urban children＇s use behavior of information communication technology （ICT）.Design/methodology/approach： Using the field survey and in-depth interviews, we interviewed 40 children aged 6 to 12 and their parents from a staff residential quarter of the Zhengzhou University--＂Shengheyuan＂ community （SHY）, and a commercial residential quarter--＂Wanfenghuicheng＂ community （WFHC） in the high-tech zone of Zhengzhou City, Henan Province. We used the social capital theory to analyze the interviewees＇ record.Findings： In urban communities, social capital is the most important factor for children （aged 6 to 12） in their ICT use. Our findings indicate that children in families with higher levels of social capital, such as internal resources, family income, parent educational backgrounds and parents＇ social network, have more-highly developed ICT skills. Personal motivation and obstacles, such as lack of access to computers on a regular basis, also have an impact on children＇s ICT use. External social capital, including schools, libraries, and public service institutes, have little impact on children＇s ICT use, if not combined with internal social capital factors.Research limitations： Our research samples were collected from two communities within the same city, which may influence the generalization of this research result.Originality/value： To explore the social capital＇s influence on children＇s ICT use, we used field observation for ICT use of children aged 6 to 12 in urban communities in China, and studied the children＇s ICT behavior from the perspective of internal and external social capital.