Due to the established energy production methods contribution to the climate crisis, renewable energy is to replace a substantial part of coal or nuclear plants to prevent greenhouse gases or toxic waste entering the atmosphere. This relatively quick shift in energy production, primarily pushed by increasing political and economical pressure, requires enormous effort on the part of the energy providers to balance out production fluctuations. Consequently, a lot of research is conducted in the key area of stochastic unit commitment (UC) on electrical grids and microgrids. The term unit commitment includes a large variety of optimization techniques, and in this paper we will review recent developments in this area. We start by giving an overview over different problem definitions and stochastic optimization procedures, to then assess recent contributions to this topic. We therefore compare the proposals and case studies of several papers.
Rickrolling is an Internet cultural phenomenon born in the mid 2000s. Originally confined to Internet fora, it has spread to other channels and media. In this paper, we hypothesize that rickrolling has reached the formal academic world. We design and conduct a systematic experiment to survey rickrolling in the academic literature. As of March 2022, there are 23 academic documents intentionally rickrolling the reader. Rickrolling happens in footnotes, code listings, references. We believe that rickrolling in academia proves inspiration and facetiousness, which is healthy for good science. This original research suggests areas of improvement for academic search engines and calls for more investigations about academic pranks and humor.
We present a slow control system to gather all relevant environment information necessary to effectively and reliably run an HPC (High Performance Computing) system at a high value over price ratio. The scalable and reliable overall concept is presented as well as a newly developed hardware device for sensor read out. This device incorporates a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and PoE (Power over Ethernet) functionality in a compact form factor. The system is in use at the 2 PFLOPS cluster of the Johannes Gutenberg-University and Helmholtz-Institute in Mainz.
This paper investigates the performance of cooperative receive diversity, for the wireless body area network (WBAN) radio channel, compliant with the IEEE 802.15.6 Standard, in the case of monitoring a sleeping person. Extensive WBAN measurements near the 2.4 GHz ISM band were used. Up to 7 dB and 20% improvement for two-hop communications with the use of relays are empirically demonstrated with respect to outage probability and outage duration, with 3-branch cooperative selection combining and 3-branch cooperative switch-and-examine combining.
Finding the position of the user is an important processing step for augmented reality (AR) applications. This paper investigates the use of different motion models in order to choose the most suitable one, and eventually reduce the Kalman filter errors in sensor fusion for such applications where the accuracy of user tracking is crucial. A Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) was employed using the innovation parameters of the filter. Results show that the approach presented here reduces the filter error compared to a static model and prevents filter divergence. The approach was tested on a simple AR game in order to justify the accuracy and performance of the algorithm.
This paper presents a new feedback shift register-based method for embedding deterministic test patterns on-chip suitable for complementing conventional BIST techniques for in-field testing. Our experimental results on 8 real designs show that the presented approach outperforms the bit-flipping approach by 24.7% on average. We also show that it is possible to exploit the uneven distribution of don't care bits in test patterns in order to reduce the area required for storing deterministic test patterns more than 3 times with less than 2% fault coverage drop.
We design, implement and test a simple algorithm which computes the approximate entropy of a finite binary string of arbitrary length. The algorithm uses a weighted average of the Shannon Entropies of the string and all but the last binary derivative of the string. We successfully test the algorithm in the fields of Prime Number Theory (where we prove explicitly that the sequence of prime numbers is not periodic), Human Vision, Cryptography, Random Number Generation and Quantitative Finance.
A health information system (HIS) is the intersection of between healthcare's business process, and information systems to deliver better healthcare services. The nature of healthcare industry, which is highly influenced by economic, social, politic, and technological factors, has changed over time. This paper will address some important concepts of healthcare and related terminologies to provide a holistic view for HIS. Related technological milestones and major events are briefly summarized. The trends and rapid development of health information technologies are also discussed.
Despite many works on collaborative networked organizations (CNOs), CSCW, groupware, workflow systems and social networks, computer support for virtual teams is still insufficient, especially support for agility, i.e. the capability of virtual team members to rapidly and cost efficiently adapt the way they interact to changes. In this paper, requirements for computer support for agile virtual teams are presented. Next, an extension of the concept of social protocol is proposed as a novel model supporting agile interactions within virtual teams. The extended concept of social protocol consists of an extended social network and a workflow model.
At this time, quality is a strategic instrument of the entities' global management, but it is also a determining element of their competitive spirit. The importance given to quality is abundantly found in the preoccupations of the European Union's Minister Board, by elaborating documents with a high impact over the quality of products/ services in special, and organizations in general. We live in an era, when the evolution of the social life puts the accent more and more on quality, resulted from various processes, at the level of various domains of the economical and social development.
Pierre-Antoine Adragna, Serge Samper, Maurice Pillet
Tolerancing of assembly mechanisms is a major interest in the product life cycle. One can distinguish several models with growing complexity, from 1-dimensional (1D) to 3-dimensional (3D) (including form deviations), and two main tolerancing assumptions, the worst case and the statistical hypothesis. This paper presents an approach to 3D statistical tolerancing using a new acceptance criterion. Our approach is based on the 1D inertial acceptance criterion that is extended to 3D and form acceptance. The modal characterisation is used to describe the form deviation of a geometry as the combination of elementary deviations (location, orientation and form). The proposed 3D statistical tolerancing is applied on a simple mechanism with lever arm. It is also compared to the traditional worst-case tolerancing using a tolerance zone.
Increasing GPS precision at low cost has always been a challenge for the manufacturers of the GPS receivers. This paper proposes the use of a Wiener filter for increasing precision in substitution of traditional GPS/INS fusion systems, which require expensive inertial systems. In this paper, we first implement and compare three GPS signal processing schemes: a Kalman filter, a neural network and a Wiener filter and compare them in terms of precision and the processing time. To further reduce the processing time of Wiener filter, we propose parallel and reduced-length implementations. Finally, we calculate the sampling frequency that would be required in every Wiener scheme in order to obtain the same total processing time as the Kalman filter and the neural network.
Reversible circuits find applications in many areas of Computer Science including Quantum Computation. This paper examines the testability of an important subclass of reversible logic circuits that are composed of k-wire controlled NOT (k-CNOT with k >/- 1) gates. A reversible k-CNOT gate can be implemented using an irreversible k-input AND gate and an EXOR gate. A reversible k-CNOT circuit where each k-CNOT gate is realized using irreversible k-input AND and EXOR gate, has been considered. One of the most commonly used Single Bridging Fault model (both wired-AND and wired-OR) has been assumed to be type of fault for such circuits. It has been shown that an (n+p)-input AND-EXOR based reversible logic circuit with p observable outputs, can be tested for single bridging faults (SBF) using (3n + \lefthalfcap log2p \righthalfcap + 2) tests.
Janssoone Thomas, Grégoire Chevreau, Lucile Vadcard
et al.
This paper describes a learning environment for image-guided prostate biopsies in cancer diagnosis; it is based on an ultrasound probe simulator virtually exploring real datasets obtained from patients. The aim is to make the training of young physicians easier and faster with a tool that combines lectures, biopsy simulations and recommended exercises to master this medical gesture. It will particularly help acquiring the three-dimensional representation of the prostate needed for practicing biopsy sequences. The simulator uses a haptic feedback to compute the position of the virtual probe from three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound recorded data. This paper presents the current version of this learning environment.
Mirela Danubianu, Iolanda Tobolcea, Stefan Gheorghe Pentiuc
One of the key challenges of the society development is related to public health and one of its specific targets includes better treatments of diseases. It is true that there are affections which by their nature do not endanger the life of a person, but they may have negative implications during his/her lifetime. Various language or speech disorders are part of this category. Discovered and treated in time, they can be corrected, most often in childhood. Because the Romanian language is a phonetic one that has its own special linguistic particularities, there is a real need to develop advanced information systems, which can be used to assist and help specialists in different speech disorders therapy. The aim of this paper is to present a few CBTS developed for the treatment of various language and speech disorders specific to the Romanian language.
This paper introduces a method to generate hierarchically modular networks with prescribed node degree list by link switching. Unlike many existing network generating models, our method does not use link probabilities to achieve modularity. Instead, it utilizes a user-specified topology to determine relatedness between pairs of nodes in terms of edge distances and links are switched to increase edge distances. To measure the modular-ness of a network as a whole, a new metric called Q2 is proposed. Comparisons are made between the Q [15] and Q2 measures. We also comment on the effect of our modularization method on other network characteristics such as clustering, hierarchy, average path length, small-worldness, degree correlation and centrality. An application of this method is reported elsewhere [12]. Briefly, the generated networks are used as test problems to explore the effect of modularity and degree distribution on evolutionary search algorithms.
This paper is concerned with the problem of designing computationally efficient Generalized Comb Filters (GCF). Basically, GCF filters are anti-aliasing filters that guarantee superior performance in terms of selectivity and quantization noise rejection compared to classical comb filters, when used as decimation filters in multistage architectures. Upon employing a partial polyphase (PP) architecture proposed in a companion paper, we develop a sensitivity analysis in order to investigate the effects of the coefficients' quantization on the frequency response of the designed filters. We show that the sensitivity of the filter response to errors in the coefficients is dependent on the particular split of the decimation factor between the two sub-filters constituting the PP architecture. The sensitivity analysis is then used for developing a fixed-point implementation of a sample filter from the class of GCF filters, used as reference filter throughout the paper. Finally, we present computer simulations in order to evaluate the performance of the designed fixed-point filters.
In this paper we present Deiush, a multimodal system for browsing hypertext Web documents. The Deiush system is based on our novel approach to automatically annotate hypertext Web documents (i.e. XHTML pages) with browsable audio components. It combines two key technologies: (1) middleware automatic separation of Web documents through structural and semantic analysis which is annotated with audio components, transforming them into XHTML+VoiceXML format to represent multimodal dialog; and (2) Opera Browser, an already standardized browser which we adopt as an interface of the XHTML+VoiceXML output of annotating. This paper describes the annotation technology of Deiush and presents an initial system evaluation.
Non-linear techniques are used to optimize the harvested energy from piezoelectric and electromagnetic generators. This paper introduces an analytical study for the voltage amplification obtained from these techniques. The analytical study is experimentally validated using a macro model of piezoelectric generator. Moreover, the integration influences on these techniques is studied. Through all the obtained results, a suitable structure for autonomous microsystems is proposed.