Active routing

Active routing permits individual customers, network managers, or network owners to control the paths that their data takes through the network. The objective is to allow routing mechanisms that provide quality of service (QoS), mobility, etc., to be quickly deployed, without waiting for standards, and to allow different routing mechanisms, that provide similar services, to compete. The current work on label switching (MPLS) can also be used to give high level customers, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), more control over their paths. We show how active routing can extend the capabilities of MPLS. We address several implementation issues, including pricing and distributed sandboxes. Pricing or policing must be used to limit the resources that customers acquire, in order to encourage them to use network resources economically. Sandboxes must be used to limit the resources that the participants acquire, in order to limit the harm that they can inflict on other participants. Active routing creates a free market system where network providers compete to sell their resources and implementers compete to sell their active routing programs. We establish a framework to quantitatively compare networks and service providers. As an example, we route Internet protocol (IP) telephony over combinations of circuit and packet networks     

Communication,Social Movements,and Collective Action: Toward a New Research Agenda in Communication for Development and Social Change

The growing emphasis on collective action raises new questions for research and practice in communication for development and social change. What actors drive processes of collective action? What are the communication features of their interventions? What type of social change processes do they enhance? What evidence demonstrates the impact of collective action processes? What theoretical frameworks inform our understanding of collective action and social change? What is the role of communication scholarship in this context? In this article, we address these questions, review the contexts of contemporary transformation and key debates in communication for development and social change, and propose a research agenda for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry.     

A Bad Workman Blames His Tweets: The Consequences of Citizens' Uncivil Twitter Use When Interacting With Party Candidates

Existing studies focusing on politicians' adoption of Twitter have found that they use it primarily as a broadcasting tool. We argue that citizens' impolite and/or uncivil behavior is one possible explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with harassment and politicians are a prime target. This alters the incentive structure of engaging in dialogue on social media. We use Spanish, Greek, German, and U.K. candidates' tweets sent during the run‐up to the recent European Parliament elections, and rely on automated text analysis and machine learning methods to measure their level of civility. Our contribution is an actor‐oriented theory of political dialogue that incorporates Twitter's specific affordances, clarifying how and why Twitter's democratic promise may be limited.     

Stimulating change in engineering education

It is generally agreed that major changes are necessary in engineering education, mainly for three reasons. First, the role of the engineer is changing markedly. Second, advances in technology are altering educational methods. Third, today's students are seeking active roles in the operation of the university. What is needed is a program incorporating experimentation, flexibility, and feedback, such as an honors program of the type now functioning at the University of Illinois. The Illinois program, which is described in this article, by definition exists for honor students. However, it has proved to be a stimulus for change in the entire undergraduate program of the college.     

Adaptive radio for multimedia wireless links

The quality of wireless links suffers from time-varying channel degradations such as interference, flat-fading, and frequency-selective fading. Current radios are limited in their ability to adapt to these channel variations because they are designed with fixed values for most system parameters such as frame length, error control, and processing gain. The values for these parameters are usually a compromise between the requirements for worst-case channel conditions and the need for low implementation cost. Therefore, in benign channel conditions these commercial radios can consume more battery energy than needed to maintain a desired link quality, while in a severely degraded channel they can consume energy without providing any quality-of-service (QoS). While techniques for adapting radio parameters to channel variations have been studied to improve link performance, in this paper they are applied to minimize battery energy. Specifically, an adaptive radio is being designed that adapts the frame length, error control, processing gain, and equalization to different channel conditions, while minimizing battery energy consumption. Experimental measurements and simulation results are presented to illustrate the adaptive radio's energy savings     

An Ontology-Based Multi-Agent System for Active Software Engineering Ontology

The ongoing trend towards multi-site software development not only brings the benefits but also creates additional challenges regarding remote communication and coordination. The Software Engineering Ontology (SE Ontology) was first developed to clarify the software engineering concepts and project information, and to enable knowledge sharing among dispersed teams. However, the current SE Ontology has the same passive structure as other ontologies that exist on the Web. Passive structure refers to a need to know exactly the concepts and relationships to which users are referring in the ontology. Otherwise, he/she may not be able to obtain the knowledge required. What is needed is active support that can help users find the information they need and provide them with meaningful output. In this paper, we propose an active Software Engineering Ontology through Multi-Agent System (SEOMAS) framework which is intended to provide active support to access software engineering domain knowledge and to recommend software project information captured in the SE Ontology. The UML and Agent UML are used to formalise the SEOMAS framework and to model interactions between the various agents. The prototype is developed and evaluated using several scenarios of the online shopping system development as a case study.     

基于改进VGG网络的单阶段船舶检测算法

单阶段多框架目标检测算法在目标检测领域取得 了成功的应用,但其针对公共数据集中船舶检测的平均精度明 显低于其它刚体类目标类别,同时现有公开数据集中的船舶数量较少且类别单一。为提高检 测精度,提出一种基于改 进VGG网络的单阶段船舶检测算法,在原有VGG底层网络的基础上加入异步卷积和最大池化的 交替连接结构,保证 实时处理的同时提高船舶检测的平均精度。为增加训练所需的船舶数量和类别,广泛收集互 联网中包含船舶的图片, 建立了包含22507个船舶目标的数据集,其中6902个目标标签细分为七类船舶。实验将公开数据集VOC2007和 VOC2012中的图片缩小至300训练后,SSS D在VOC2007test中的平均检测精度均值可达79.3%,平均检测速度 超过40 fps。通过迁移参数的方法,在自建数据集中训练后,对大类 船舶检测的平均精度超 过84%,对七类船舶检测的平均精度均值超过89%,领先现有同类船舶检测 算法。     

Teaching engineering

Numerous studies of the workforce indicate a growing gap between skills needed in the near future and adequate preparation in those skills in the schoolhouse. This is particularly true in engineering where the rapid pace of technology innovation makes preparing engineers for successful careers more difficult. We know that global challenges exist that demand sophisticated engineering skills combined with effective business management and ethical decision making. In another view, surveys reveal that engineers in practice are positive about their educational experience, believe they are prepared for their careers, and highly value their university program and professors. So, what to do?     

相变存储器单元疲劳特性研究

本文主要研究了相变存储器存储单元的疲劳特性。随着操作次数的增多,相变存储器单元在高阻态和低祖态下的阻值逐渐的向着相反的方向变化。同时,本文还讨论了在疲劳操作下,相变单元状态改变所需的操作条件也在逐渐的改变。在最初的一定次数的疲劳操作条件下,单元的阈值电压缓慢的减小,并且在之后的操作中,阈值电压急剧增大。这是由于器件单元的界面效应以及相变区域体积变化工作作用引起的。本文对于之一现象,给出了合理的解释以及数据加以证明。     

An integrated project of entrepreneurship and innovation in engineering education

This paper presents a new line of project based learning in the School of Engineering of University of Minho: the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Integrated Project (IEIP). Four groups, each one composed of students from different engineering integrated master courses – Mechanical, Industrial Electronics and Computers, Polymer, Industrial Management – compete against each other in developing or improving commercial products manufactured by actual industries. There have been so far five editions of the IEIP, with five different companies and five diverse products, however, all these products included components that required knowledge from all the engineering courses involved. Only with the cooperation between the students of the various courses that compose each multidisciplinary team, the success is attainable. As each student has to deal with various engineering scopes, students’ technical skills are greatly enlarged and they acquire a multidisciplinary knowledge that was not possible in another way. Their soft skills like project management, teamwork, communication ability and personal development, which are valuable requisites for their future employers, are also improved. The participating industries also take advantage of the project: the groups competing against each other act as a multiskilled work force, actually making proposals capable of improving their products, their efficiency, and reducing costs.     

A radical new router

The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it. In 1967, I wrote the first plan for the ancestor of today's Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, and then led the team that designed and built it. The main idea was to share the available network infrastructure by sending data as small, independent packets, which, though they might arrive at different times, would still generally make it to their destinations. The small computers that directed the data traffic-I called them Interface Message Processors, or IMPs-evolved into today?s routers, and for a long time they've kept up with the Net's phenomenal growth. Until now.     

A computer-controlled research ventilator for small animals: designand evaluation

The understanding of the mechanical properties of the mammalian respiratory system and how they change under the influence of drugs and in disease are frequently pursued in small animals, since they can be easily obtained in large numbers as pure-bred strains. However, conventional experimental set-ups for studying small animals are generally limited in their ability to measure gas flow into the lungs. Here, the authors present a computer-controlled research ventilator for small animals which can provide conventional mechanical ventilation as well as arbitrary flow perturbations with a bandwidth from 0-55 Hz. Respiratory impedance is estimated from the displacement of the piston and the pressure it generates, thereby obviating the need for a direct flow measurement. The performance of the device was tested on mechanical loads whose impedances were calculated theoretically. The measured and predicted loads agreed within less than 5% up to 30 Hz. Furthermore, the measured impedance of two mechanical loads in series precisely matched the sum of their individual impedances     

Shipboard interior communication needs for men-on-the-move

The use of walkie-talkie radios to supplement fixed wire interior communications systems on ships is discussed. Electrical and acoustical noise interference problems were studied on replenishment ships, and the use of FM at VHF together with noiseproofed acoustic transducers was found necessary for many operations and/or for men in certain locations. RF signal penetration tests showed VHF to be superior to HF for reliable communications between certain interior spaces and the weather decks. In some cases antennas with coaxial lead-ins had to be provided to maintain adequate communications. These and many other problems were found to exist when alternate interim solutions to a man-on-the-move communication (MOMCOM) problem were tried on the U.S.S. Mars (AFS-1). In addition to finding a workable interim system, many problems and some answers were uncovered that will lead to a better integrated MOMCOM system for future ships.     

The performance of antenna amplifiers used for terrestrial DTV reception

Measurements were made on currently available commercial antenna-mounted amplifiers to ascertain their effects on DTV reception. Data regarding amplifier gain and noise figure is presented, followed by data illustrating the effects of intermodulation within the tested amplifiers as shown by the change in the D/U interference ratio of a control DTV receiver, and ending with observations regarding amplifier environmental sensitivity. Also presented are the inconsistencies between the performance of commercially available amplifiers, advertised to the public for use with television, and the performance claims made by the manufacturers of such amplifiers.     

Over and over and out [emergency radio systems]

In the future, emergency systems will have to account for the orderly use of multiple communications channels. This is most easily done using digital radios. Although much has been said about such radios in connection with the communications problems on 9/11, the fact is that the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) had no such radios on the scene that day. Redundancy, clearly, was not overlooked by the FDNY. What the department did not anticipate was the scope and scale of the disaster. Future systems will doubtless have even more redundancy, some of it deployed well out of the immediate hazard area. Emergency repeaters mounted on helicopters might also prove valuable in dealing with skyscraper fires, especially since they could easily change position as needed to ensure coverage of a particular area.     

基于对话内容的交互型文本会话主题挖掘

传统的主题挖掘模型一般仅从交互型文本中挖掘出文档主题,为了能够从中挖掘出会话主题并提高挖掘模型的普适性,提出了一种基于对话内容的交互型文本会话主题生成模型。首先通过分析交互型文本的特征,基于主题树的概念,定义了一个5层结构的对话生成树。以此为基础,再基于LDA构建会话主题生成模型(ST-LDA)。最后采用吉布斯抽样法对ST-LDA进行推导,得到会话主题及其分布概率。使用实际数据进行验证,结果表明,ST-LDA模型可以从交互型文本中有效地挖掘出会话主题。此外,成果可以降低分类算法的复杂度,回溯主题—参与者关联关系,具有较好的普适性。     

The lte/sae trial initiative: taking lte/sae from specification to rollout - LTE part II: 3GPP release 8

Now that the standards for LTE/SAE are functionally frozen, we consider the activities needed to implement the technology and prepare it for commercial rollout: prototyping, interoperability testing, and field trials. The LSTI is a global initiative of operators and vendors who are coordinating and reporting progress on these activities to ensure that everyone has a realistic understanding of what performance and functionality to expect from LTE, and the readiness of the technology for commercial roll out. The LSTI aims to accelerate commercialization of LTE/SAE by fostering technology alignment across all key vendor participants. This article provides an overview of the activities and gives an update on the results published so far.