Abstract

The eSaguTMsystem is an IT-based personalized agro advisory system. In this system, the agricultural experts generate the advice by using the latest information about the crop situation received in the form of both photographs and text. The agricultural expert advice is delivered to each farm on a regular basis (typically once in a week/two weeks depending on the type of crop) from the sowing stage to the harvesting stage to the farmer without farmer asking a question. Since 2004, the eSagu system is being developed by operating on several crops and farms in Andhra Pradesh state of India. It has been found that the agriculture expert can prepare the expert advice in an efficient manner based on the crop photographs and the related information. The impact results show that the expert advices helped the farmers to achieve significant savings in the capital investment and improvement in the yield. Encouraged by the results of eSagu experiment, a country-wide integrated agri-service program is planned by Media Lab Asia to provide expert advice and other agri-related services to Indian farming community. In this paper we briefly explain the development of eSagu system, advantages and future plan.

Abstract

Information systems receive data through theuser interface forms. Improperly designed user interface formincreases navigational burden which in turn increases data-entry cost and data-entry errors. Research efforts are goingon to investigate the improved methods for user interfacedesign. Normally, context-based approach is followed to designuser interfaces. In this approach, the input attributes aredivided into several contexts based on the functionality anduser interface form is designed for each context. It can beobserved that, in some information systems, some attributesreceive values only during certain time duration. We termthis property as temporality of the attribute. In this paper,we have proposed an approach to exploit the temporality ofattributes for identifying the active-contexts to design improveduser interface. The implementation results on a real systemshow that the proposed method reduces the navigationalburden significantly as compared to the existing context-basedapproach

Abstract

Recently, an approach has been proposed in the literatureto extract frequent patterns which occur periodically. Inthis paper, we have proposed an approach to extract rareperiodic-frequent patterns. Normally, the singleminsupbased frequent pattern mining approaches like Apriori andFP-growth suffer from “rare item problem”. That is, at highminsu p, frequent patterns consisting of rare items will bemissed, and at lowminsu p, number of frequent patternsexplode. In the literature, efforts have been made to extractrare frequent patterns under “multiple minimum supportframework”. It was observed that the periodic-frequentpattern mining approach also suffers from the “rare itemproblem”. In this paper, we have extended “multiple mini-mum support framework” to extract rare periodic-frequentpatterns and developed a new algorithm to extract rareperiodic-frequent patterns. Experiment results show thatthe proposed approach is efficient.

Abstract

To improve the performance of agricultural education, research efforts are being made to exploit to developan education methodology to impart practical skills to agricultural graduates regarding aforesaid farming situationproblems in an effective and efficient manner. In this paper, we explain the background and the overview of theproposed ICT-based framework to impart applied education to agriculture professionals.

Abstract

A read-only transaction (ROT) does not modify any data. The main issues regarding processing of read-only transactions (ROTs) are correctness, data currency and performance. Even though the popular two-phase locking protocol processes ROTs correctly with no data currency related issues, its performance deteriorates with data contention. To improve the performance of ROTs, snapshot isolation-based approaches have been proposed. Eventhough snapshot isolation-based approaches improve the performance of ROTs, both data currency of ROTs andcorrectness (serializability) are compromised. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous speculative locking protocol (called as ASLR) which improves the performance ofROTs by trading extra processing resources. The simulation results show that ASLR improves the performance of ROTs significantly over two-phase locking and snapshot isolation-based approaches with manageable extra processing resources. The ASLR approach processes ROTs without any data currency and correctness issues.

Abstract

A read-only transaction (ROT) does not modify anydata. Efforts are being made in the literature toimprove the performance of ROTs without correct-ness and data currency issues. The widely used two-phase locking protocol (2PL) processes the transac-tions without any correctness and data currency issues.However, the performance of 2PL deteriorates withdata contention. Snapshot isolation (SI)-based pro-tocols proposed in the literature improve the perfor-mance of ROTs, but they compromise on correctnessand data currency issues. Speculative locking (SL)protocols are proposed in the literature for improv-ing the performance of ROTs by carrying out spec-ulative executions only for ROTs and following 2PLfor update transactions. In SL-based protocols, up-date transactions are blocked if they conflicting withROTs. In this paper, we have proposed an improvedapproach to improve parallelism among update trans-actions and ROTs by exploiting a new notion called“compensatability”. In this protocol, an ROT whichcan be “compensatable” can complete the executionand carry out compensating operation to incorporatethe effect of conflicting update transactions. As aresult, the parallelism is improved over SL protocolsas the update transactions which are conflicting with‘compensatable’ ROTs need not block. In this paper,we have proposed a protocol by exploiting both “com-pensatability” property of ROTs and speculation. Thesimulation results show that the proposed protocol im-proves the performance by carrying out less number ofspeculative executions. Further, the proposed protocoldoes not violate serializability criteria.

Abstract

A read-only transaction (ROT) does not modify any data. The main issues regarding processing ROTs are correctness, data currency and performance. Two-phase Locking (2PL) protocol is widely used for concur-rency control with serializabilty as correctness criteria. Even though 2PL processes ROTs correctly with no data currency related issues, the performance deteriorates as data contention increases. To improve the performance, an approach has been proposed in the literature by considering “Snapshot Isolation (SI)” as correctness criteria to process ROTs. At SI-level, ROTs are processed by reading from a snapshot of the committed data and ignoring the modifications produced by the concurrent active transactions. Even though SI-based algorithms improve the performance of ROTs, data currency of ROTs and correctness (serializability) are compromised. In this paper, we propose an approach by extending the notion of speculation to improve the performance of ROTs without com-promising data currency of transactions and correctness. Speculation-based approach improves the performance of ROTs by trading extra computing resources without violating serializability as correctness criteria. The simula-tion results show that with the proposed protocol the throughput performance is improved significantly over 2PL and the data currency of ROTs is improved significantly over SI-based ap proaches with manageable extra re-sources.

Abstract

In this paper, we explain a personalized agricultural advisory system called eSagu, which has been developed to improve the performance and utilization of agriculture technology and help Indian farmers. In eSagu, rather than visiting the crop in person, the agricultural expert delivers the expert advice at regular intervals (once in one or two weeks) to each farm by getting the crop status in the form of digital photographs and other information. During 2004-06, through eSagu, agricultural expert advices delivered for about 6000 farms covering six crops. The results show that the expert advices helped the farmers to achieve savings in capital investment and improved the crop yield. Mainly, the data warehouse of farm histories has been developed which is providing the crop related information to the agricultural expert in an integrated manner for generating a quality agricultural expert advice. In this paper, after explaining eSagu and its advantages, we discuss how data warehouse of farm histories is enabling agricultural expert to deliver a quality expert advice. We also discuss some research issues to improve the performance of eSagu.

Abstract

A read-only transaction (ROT) does not modify any data. The main issues regarding processing ROTs are correctness, data currency and perform-ance. Two-phase Locking (2PL) protocol is widely used for concurrency con-trol with serializabilty as correctness criteria. Even though 2PL processes ROTs correctly with no data currency related issues, the performance deteriorates as data contention increases. To improve the performance over 2PL, snapshot iso-lation (SI)-based protocols have been proposed. SI-based protocols process ROTs by reading from a snapshot of the committed data and ignoring the modi-fications produced by the concurrent active transactions. Even though SI-based algorithms improve the performance of ROTs, both data currency of ROTs and correctness (serializability) are compromised. In this paper, we propose an ap-proach to improve the performance of ROTs using speculation without compromising data currency of transactions and correctness. The proposed approach improves the performance of ROTs by trading extra computing re-sources without violating serializability as correctness criteria. The simulation results show that with the proposed protocol the throughput performance is im-proved significantly over 2PL and SI-based approaches with manageable extra resources.

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.