Abstract

To bridge the information gap between the agricultural expert and the farmer, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad has built the eSagu (“Sagu” means cultivation in Telugu language) system, which is an IT-based personalized agricultural extension system to improve agricultural productivity by disseminating a fresh expert agricultural advice to the farmers, both in a timely and personalized manner. In e-Sagu, the agricultural experts generate the expert advice based on the information about the crop situation received in the form of both text and digital photographs. In Kharif2 2004, a prototype was developed and implemented with 1051 farms. In the prototype, a team of agricultural experts stayed at IIIT, Hyderabad (India) and delivered 20,000 pieces of agricultural expert advice to 1051 cotton farms of three villages (Oorugonda, Gudeppad and Oglapur) in Atmakur Mandal of Warangal district in Andhra Pradesh state, India, by looking at digital photographs and other farm information supplied by some educated and experienced farmers (coordinators) in these villages. The pilot project was implemented successfully. In this article, an analysis of 51 registered farmers’ regarding compliance of advices and corresponding effect is reported. The following of expert advice on pest and disease management and IPM practices were analyzed by giving appropriate scores based on their effect on yield and input cost. The analysis showed that about fifty percent of farmers have followed the practices which increase yield and reduce input cost. A high positive correlation (r=0.46**) was observed between the compliance rate and the yields. Though some farmers obtained same yield as the farmers who have followed the advices, their input costs were significantly higher.

Abstract

In view of technology/extension gaps in Indian agriculture and to exploit ICT revolution, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, A.P., India had developed eSagu model of extension system and implemented it for the cotton crop in three villages of Oorugonda, Gudeppad and Oglapur covering 749 farmers and 1041 farms during 2004-05 crop season. The main objective is to build a cost effective and scalable agricultural expert advice dissemination system to all the farmers. The three-tier system consists of farmers as end users, coordinators as intermediaries to obtain crop status through digital photographs and text and communicate the advice to the farmers. The scientists with knowledge system prepare farm advices. The evaluation study clearly brings out the feasibility and acceptability of ICT based model of eSagu. The crop status, the zooming facility of digital photographs, weather data, crop history, soil data, all have enabled the scientists in advice making and prediction. The advices were provided to the farmers in 24-36 hours. eSagu operation has improved the access, knowledge and technology adoption rate as compared to their counter parts in non-project area. It further established that the acquired technology has been quite useful and reflected in increased production by 1.5 quintals per acre, saved fertilizers by 0.76 bags, pesticides by 2.3 sprays per acre. This has resulted in a net gain of Rs. 3820.0 per acre. Farmers’ response to the utility of the project is quite positive and they want the project to continue in the future. In conclusion, the evaluation study reveals that accomplishments of the project are impressive, the system is generally accepted and throws a promise for wider application in the future.

Abstract

The growing trend towards commercial crops with ever changing technology packages necessitate a transformation in the existing agricultural extension system with emerging technologies like IT.In this context IIIT , Hyderabad has developed and implemented eSagu, a Web Based Agricultural Expert Advice Dissemination System in Atmakur mandal, Warangal district during 2004-05 covering 1,051 cotton farms. eSagu system of extension has succeeded in acquisition of infrastructure and human resources as envisaged and proved its organizational ability in coordinating different branches for a smooth functioning on proposed lines. Wholistic information in the form of clear images of crop (through digital photographs and zooming) and other information i.e. soil, weather, crop history has helped scientists to provide effective advice. The system was able to offer collective expert advice from one place with in 24 hours of response time to the farmers at the other end. Further, it is only the information that moved, while the farmers and scientists remained at their respective working places. The system has proved its technical efficiency in terms of pest identification and prediction with appropriate advices based on IPM practices to all sections of farmers. In the process of information dissemination, the system was able to provide 20,000 advices and accumulated 1,11,000 crop photographs in a period of one year. In the field of research it was able to identify new pests like stem borer and early detection of Gray Mildew disease and share the information with other research agencies. As an experiment, the project has tested feasibility and acceptability of IT for tapping its potential as an alternative to the existing extension system. It also offers scope for further reduction in the cost of delivery of advice provided a cluster based approach is adopted in the future

Abstract

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Abstract

With the rapid growth of the Internet, most of the textualdata in the form of newspapers, magazines and journals tend to be avail-able on-line. Summarizing these texts can aid the users access the in-formation content at a faster pace. However, doing this task manuallyis expensive and time-consuming. Automatic text summarization is asolution for dealing with this problem. For a given text, a text summa-rization algorithm selects a few salient sentences based on certain fea-tures. In the literature, weight-based, foci-based, and machine learningapproaches have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a popularity-based approach for text summarization. A popularity of the sentence isdetermined based on the number of other sentences similar to it. Usingthe notion of popularity, it is possible to extract potential sentences forsummarization that could not be extracted by the existing approaches.The experimental results show that by applying both popularity andweight-based criteria it is possible to extract effective summaries.

Abstract

Ranking the search results is an important research problem in WWW. HITS, PageRank and variations of these algorithms are widely used approaches for ranking. In this paper we proposed a new ranking algorithm to rank the search results by introducing the concept of “leader-page”. The notion of “leader-page” is defined by extending the concept of “leader” from leadership theory. In leadership theory, a leader is defined as a person, who has more contacts with the other members of the group, both initiates and receives communication, and whose characteristics are the most similar to the group’s own characteristics. Similarly, in WWW, the proposed approach identifies leader-pages and assigns “leadership score” to them based on several kinds of cyclic and similarity relationships it establishes with other web pages. Given a set of key words (search query), the proposed approach ranks the related pages based on the corresponding “leadership score”. The experiment results show that the proposed approach gives high leadership score to resourceful pages as compared to the results of the HITS algorithm and the Google search engine

Abstract

n this paper, we have proposed speculative locking (SL) protocols to improve the performance of distributed databasesystems (DDBSs) by trading extra processing resources. In SL, a transaction releases the lock on the data object whenever itproduces corresponding after-image during its execution. By accessing both before and after-images, the waiting transaction carriesout speculative executions and retains one execution based on the termination (commit or abort) mode of the preceding transactions.By carrying out multiple executions for a transaction, SL increases parallelism without violating serializability criteria. Under the naiveversion of SL, the number of speculative executions of the transaction explodes with data contention. By exploiting the fact that asubmitted transaction is more likely to commit than abort, we propose the SL variants that process transactions efficiently bysignificantly reducing the number of speculative executions. The simulation results indicate that even with manageable extraresources, these variants significantly improve the performance over two-phase locking in the DDBS environments where transactionsspend longer time for processing and transaction-aborts occur frequently.

Abstract

Insect pests are a major cause of crop loss globally. Pest management will be effective and efficient if we can predict the occurrence of peak activities of a given pest. Research efforts are going on to understand the pest dynamics by applying analytical and other techniques on pest surveillance data sets. In this study we make an effort to understand pest population dynamics using Neural Networks by analyzing pest surveillance data set of Helicoverpa armigera or Pod borer on chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) crop. The results show that neural network method successfully predicts the pest attack incidences for one week in advance.

Abstract

Distributed locking is commonly adopted for performing concurrency control in distributed systems. It incorporatesadditional steps for handling deadlocks. This activity is carried out by methods based on wait-for-graphs or probes. The present studyexamines detection of conflicts based on enhanced local processing for distributed concurrency control. In the proposed “edgedetection” approach, a graph-based resolution of access conflicts has been adopted. The technique generates a uniform wait-forprecedence order at distributed sites for transactions to execute. The earlier methods based on serialization graph testing are difficultto implement in a distributed environment. The edge detection approach is a fully distributed approach. It presents a unified techniquefor locking and deadlock detection exercises. The technique eliminates many deadlocks without incurring message overheads

Abstract

The blocking phenomena in two-phase commit (2PC) reduces the availability of the system as the blocked transactionskeep all the resources until the recovery of the coordinator. The three-phase commit (3PC) protocol involves an extra roundof message transmission to resolve the blocking problem. In this paper, we propose a backup commit (BC) protocol to reducethe blocking problem by attaching multiple backup sites to the coordinator site. In BC, after receiving responses from theparticipants, the coordinator quickly communicates the final decision to the backup sites, before it sends the final decision tothe participants. When blocking occurs, the participant sites can terminate the transaction by consulting a backup site of thecoordinator. The BC protocol resolves the blocking in most of the coordinator site failures without involving an expensivecommunication cycle as in 3PC. The simulation experiments indicate that the throughput performance of BC is close to 2PC.2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.