Architecture and Archaeoastronomy in Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli, Rome

Built by the emperor Hadrian starting in 117 A.D., the villa is a masterpiece of ancient Roman architecture. Our Accademia Pilot project studied and surveyed the Accademia Esplanade, the highest artificial terrace of the villa, discovering that it was astronomically oriented along the solstitial axis, as were its main buildings, Accademia and Roccabruna. From 2009 to 2011 we photographed a series of light phenomena. In the Accademia at dawn of the winter solstice or at sunset of the summer solstice (opposed by 180°) the sun shines through the main axis of the building, creating spots of light in the Temple of Apollo. In Roccabruna at the summer solstice the sun creates a blade of light inside the dome. Archaeoastronomy provided a new key for understanding the meaning and function of those buildings, which were probably dedicated to the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, linked to the seasons.     

Complexity analysis of the Pawlak’s flowgraph extension for re-identification in multi-camera surveillance system

The idea of Pawlak’s flowgraph turned out to be a useful and convenient container for a knowledge of objects’ behaviour and movements within the area observed with a multi-camera surveillance system. Utilization of the flowgraph for modelling behaviour admittedly requires certain extensions and enhancements, but it allows for combining many rules into a one data structure and for obtaining parameters describing how objects tend to move through the supervised area. The main aim of this article is presentation of the complexity analysis of proposed modification of flowgraphs. This analysis contains considerations of issues such as memory efficiency and computational complexity of operations on the flowgraph. The measures related to space and time efficiency were also included.     

The machine’s role in human’s service automation and knowledge sharing

The possibility of interacting with remote services in natural language opens up new opportunities for sharing knowledge and for automating services. Easy-to-use, text-based interfaces might provide more democratic access to legal information, government services, and everyday knowledge as well. However, the methodology of engineering robust natural language interfaces is very diverse, and widely deployed solutions are still yet to come. The main contribution is a detailed problem analysis on the theoretical level, which reveals that a text-based interface is best understood as an artificial agent that represents the interests of the remote party who is separated in time and space from the client. A possible ethical issue about the development of such an agent is also discussed.     

Mutual information, variation, and Fano’s inequality

Some upper and lower bounds are obtained for the maximum of the absolute value of the difference between the mutual information |I(X; Y) ? I(X′; Y′)| of two pairs of discrete random variables (X, Y) and (X′, Y′) via the variational distance between the probability distributions of these pairs. In particular, the upper bound obtained here substantially generalizes and improves the upper bound of [1]. In some special cases, our upper and lower bounds coincide or are rather close. It is also proved that the lower bound is asymptotically tight in the case where the variational distance between (X, Y) and (X′ Y′) tends to zero.     

Aggregate Demand,Harrod’s Instability and Fluctuations

Long-run analyses usually stress the leading role of aggregate supply. As a result, aggregate demand is supposed to adjust in order to accommodate supply changes. In a medium-run perspective, however, both aggregate demand and supply forces must be taken into account. In this case, the stability of the model cannot be taken for granted. The objective of the present paper is to study the dynamics generated by both forces within a Harrodian framework. Two main results are obtained. On one hand, the instability property of the model is illustrated. On the other, the introduction of some nonlinearities can constrain instability. The role of the rate of interest and the nature of the expectations in obtaining these results is stressed.     

Development of Mini UAV-borne LiDAR System and It’s Application of Power Line Inspection#br#

Mini UVA borne LiDAR system is a research hotspot nowadays,It has the characteristics of low cost,easy to carry and flexible to use,and has developed rapidly in recent years.This paper proposes a complete solution of the data acquisition and processing analysis by mini-UAV-borne LiDAR system,which mounted on a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle.Aiming at the time synchronization and structure integration design and settling angle error elimination involved in the development of mini UAV-borne lidar system,a complete solution for data acquisition and processing analysis of light and mini UAV-borne lidar under complex terrain conditions is proposed.The integrated system is used to carry out power line patrol application,and the number of tests are carried out.According to the analysis results,the advantages of the system in power line inspection are fully demonstrated,and its functions and performances are verified.     

Big Data in Experimental Mechanics and Model Order Reduction: Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities

Since the turn of the century experimental solid mechanics has undergone major changes with the generalized use of images. The number of acquired data has literally exploded and one of today’s challenges is related to the saturation of mining procedures through such big data sets. With respect to digital image/volume correlation one of tomorrow’s pathways is to better control and master this data flow with procedures that are optimized for extracting the sought information with minimum uncertainties and maximum robustness. In this paper emphasis is put on various hierarchical identification procedures. Based on such structures a posteriori model/data reductions are performed in order to ease and make the exploitation of the experimental information far more efficient. Some possibilities related to other model order reduction techniques like the proper generalized decomposition are discussed and new opportunities are sketched.     

Intertheoretic Reduction,Confirmation, and Montague’s Syntax-Semantics Relation

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. This paper presents a case study of a new type of intertheoretic relation that is inspired by Montague’s analysis of the linguistic syntax-semantics relation. The paper develops a simple model of this relation. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends the scope of application of the Nagelian (or related) models and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework.     

Narrow privacy and desynchronization in Vaudenay’s RFID model

Forward privacy of RFID systems and its relaxed version, narrow forward privacy, are generally considered satisfactory for practical needs. Unfortunately, the attempt to get forward privacy by symmetric-key cryptography failed. Also, all symmetric-key cryptography-based RFID systems proposed so far that are strictly narrow forward private (that is, narrow forward private but not forward private) suffer from desynchronization. Under these circumstances, the question whether the attempt to exceed these limits is doomed to failure or not was frequently asked. The paper we are proposing wants to clarify this matter. Thus, we show that forward privacy in Vaudenay’s RFID model cannot be achieved with symmetric-key cryptography. Then, we show that strictly narrow forward privacy can be achieved with symmetric-key cryptography only by RFID systems with unbounded desynchronization. This last result holds for strictly narrow destructive privacy and strictly narrow strong privacy too, if one wants to achieve them with symmetric-key cryptography.

     

Modeling and Solving Human Arm’s Posture in Reachablity Analysis

Reachability is a key criterion in maintenance design, and human arm is the main object in reachability analysis. The human arm’s DOF is reduced, and applying military standards and human physiological constraints, the simplified arm model of 7-DOF using D-H method is built up. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to acquire the shoulder, arm and hand posture with adaptive fitness function. A detailed reachability analysis is accomplished for disassembling the bolts from crank shaft is given as an exam...     

Risk consideration and cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma

This paper investigates the cooperative behavior in the two-player iterated prisoner’s dilemma (IPD) game with the consideration of income stream risk. The standard deviation of one-move payoffs for players is defined for measuring the income stream risk, and thus the risk effect on the cooperation in the two-player IPD game is examined. A two-population coevolutionary learning model, embedded with a niching technique, is developed to search optimal strategies for two players to play the IPD game. As experimental results illustrate, risk-averse players perform better than risk-seeking players in cooperating with opponents. In particular, in the case with short game encounters, in which cooperation has been demonstrated to be difficult to achieve in previous work, a high level of cooperation can be obtained in the IPD if both players are risk-averse. The reason is that risk consideration induces players to negotiate for stable gains, which lead to steady mutual cooperation in the IPD. This cooperative pattern is found to be quite robust against low levels of noise. However, with increasingly higher levels of noise, only intermediate levels of cooperation can be achieved in games between two risk-averse players. Games with risk-seeking players get to even lower cooperation levels. By comparing the players’ strategies coevolved with and without a high level of noise, the main reason for the reduction in the extent of cooperation can be explained as the lack of contrition and forgiveness of players in the high-noise interactions. Moreover, although increasing encounter length is helpful in improving cooperation in the noiseless and low-noise IPD, we find that it may enforce the absence of contrition and forgiveness, and thus make cooperation even more difficult in the high-noise games.     

Perception of Order and Ambiguity in Leonardo’s Design Concepts

Leonardo da Vinci used geometry to give his design concepts both structural and visual balance. The paper examines aesthetic order in Leonardo’s structural design, and reflects on his belief in analogy between structure and anatomy. Leonardo’s drawings of grids and roof systems are generated from processes best known from ornamentation and can be developed into spatial structures assembled from loose elements with no need for binding elements. His architectural plans are patterns based on principles of tessellation, tiling and recursion, also characteristic of the reversible, ambiguous structures which led to Leonardo’s further inventions in structural and mechanical design as well as dynamic representations of space in his painting. In recent times, the ambiguous structures in the art of Joseph Albers, the reversible and impossible structures of M. C. Escher, the recurring patterns and spherical geometry of Buckminster Fuller and the reciprocal grids in structural design of Cecil Balmond display a similar interest. Computer models and animations have been used to simulate processes of perceiving and creating ambiguity in structures.     

Diagnosis of lung nodule using Moran’s index and Geary’s coefficient in computerized tomography images

This paper analyzes the application of Moran’s index and Geary’s coefficient to the characterization of lung nodules as malignant or benign in computerized tomography images. The characterization method is based on a process that verifies which combination of measures, from the proposed measures, has been best able to discriminate between the benign and malignant nodules using stepwise discriminant analysis. Then, a linear discriminant analysis procedure was performed using the selected features to evaluate the ability of these in predicting the classification for each nodule. In order to verify this application we also describe tests that were carried out using a sample of 36 nodules: 29 benign and 7 malignant. A leave-one-out procedure was used to provide a less biased estimate of the linear discriminator’s performance. The two analyzed functions and its combinations have provided above 90% of accuracy and a value area under receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curve above 0.85, that indicates a promising potential to be used as nodules signature measures. The preliminary results of this approach are very encouraging in characterizing nodules using the two functions presented.