Many At Once: Capturing Intentions to Create And Use Many Views At Once In Large Display Environments

This paper describes results from an observational, exploratory study of visual data exploration in a large, multi-view, flexible canvas environment. Participants were provided with a set of data exploration sub-tasks associated with a local crime dataset and were instructed to pose questions to a remote mediator who would respond by generating and organizing visualizations on the large display. We observed that participants frequently posed requests to cast a net around one or several subsets of the data or a set of data attributes. They accomplished this directly and by utilizing existing views in unique ways, including by requesting to copy and pivot a group of views collectively and posing a set of parallel requests on target views expressed in one command. These observed actions depart from multi-view flexible canvas environments that typically provide interfaces in support of generating one view at a time or actions that operate on one view at a time. We describe how participants used these ‘cast-a-net’ requests for tasks that spanned more than one view and describe design considerations for multi-view environments that would support the observed multi-view generation actions.     

Comprehensive study of RF analysis of G/GO-based NEMS shunt switch

Microsystem Technologies - High isolation and low insertion loss are the key design parameters for the NEMS switch at high frequency. The comprehensive study of radio frequency (RF) performance...     

Observing Human-Object Interactions: Using Spatial and Functional Compatibility for Recognition

Interpretation of images and videos containing humans interacting with different objects is a daunting task. It involves understanding scene/event, analyzing human movements, recognizing manipulable objects, and observing the effect of the human movement on those objects. While each of these perceptual tasks can be conducted independently, recognition rate improves when interactions between them are considered. Motivated by psychological studies of human perception, we present a Bayesian approach which integrates various perceptual tasks involved in understanding human-object interactions. Previous approaches to object and action recognition rely on static shape/appearance feature matching and motion analysis, respectively. Our approach goes beyond these traditional approaches and applies spatial and functional constraints on each of the perceptual elements for coherent semantic interpretation. Such constraints allow us to recognize objects and actions when the appearances are not discriminative enough. We also demonstrate the use of such constraints in recognition of actions from static images without using any motion information.     

Area-based quality control of airborne laser scanning 3D models for different land classes using terrestrial laser scanning: sample survey in Houston,USA

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is a remote-sensing technique that provides scale-accurate 3D models consisting of dense point clouds with x, y planimetric coordinates and altitude z. Using ALS, very high-resolution (VHR) digital surface models (DSMs) have been widely used for commercial and scientific applications since the early 1990s. Although there is widespread usage, there has been little comprehensive investigation of quality control for ALS DSMs in the literature, as most studies have been limited to assessing point-based vertical accuracy. This article is dedicated to investigating the quality of ALS DSMs for different land classes using statistical and visual approaches based on absolute and relative vertical accuracy metrics. Rather than a limited number of ground control points (GCP), the model-to-model-based approach is applied and DSMs derived from terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds that have around 5 mm absolute and 3 mm relative geolocation accuracy were used as the reference data for comparison. The results demonstrate that in open, grass, and building land classes, the ALS DSMs reached both standard deviation (σ) and normalized median absolute deviation (NMAD) of 3–5 cm after the elimination of any systematic biases. This result sufficiently satisfies the vertical accuracy requirements for 1/1000-scale topographic maps determined by National Digital Elevation Program (NDEP) specifications. In tall vegetation, a higher number of discrepancies larger than 0.5 m exist, reversing the relation between σ and NMAD. These vegetation errors also do not appear to be normally distributed. As an additional investigation, the performance of ALS DEMs under dense high-vegetation areas was assessed. These under-canopy ALS DEMs, created using only classified ground returns, offer both σ and NMAD of 12–14 cm, a performance level that is difficult to achieve under-canopy using photogrammetric techniques.     

A survey on resource allocation in high performance distributed computing systems

An efficient resource allocation is a fundamental requirement in high performance computing (HPC) systems. Many projects are dedicated to large-scale distributed computing systems that have designed and developed resource allocation mechanisms with a variety of architectures and services. In our study, through analysis, a comprehensive survey for describing resource allocation in various HPCs is reported. The aim of the work is to aggregate under a joint framework, the existing solutions for HPC to provide a thorough analysis and characteristics of the resource management and allocation strategies. Resource allocation mechanisms and strategies play a vital role towards the performance improvement of all the HPCs classifications. Therefore, a comprehensive discussion of widely used resource allocation strategies deployed in HPC environment is required, which is one of the motivations of this survey. Moreover, we have classified the HPC systems into three broad categories, namely: (a) cluster, (b) grid, and (c) cloud systems and define the characteristics of each class by extracting sets of common attributes. All of the aforementioned systems are cataloged into pure software and hybrid/hardware solutions. The system classification is used to identify approaches followed by the implementation of existing resource allocation strategies that are widely presented in the literature.     

A Novel Technique to Investigate the Impact of Temperature and Process Parameters on Electrostatic and Analog/RF Performance of Channel Modulated Junctionless Gate-all-around (CM-JL-GAA) MOSFET

Silicon - The channel modulated junctionless gate all around (CM-JL-GAA) MOSFET improves the SCE’s with high graded doping of the channel region. Temperature effects on electrostatic and...     

Investigation of Noise Characteristics in Gate-Source Overlap Tunnel Field-Effect Transistor

Silicon - The analog circuit performance of tunnel field-effect-transistor (TFET) can be improved by implementing the concept of gate-source overlap. This paper investigates the impact of variation...     

Consideration of uncertainties in seismic analysis of non-classically damped coupled systems

This paper proposes a method to evaluate the design response of a non-classically damped coupled primary-secondary system by statistically incorporating the effects of uncertainties in modal properties of its constituent uncoupled systems. Within the framework for the coupled system seismic analysis, the uncertainties can be accounted for by modeling the uncoupled modal properties of primary and secondary systems as random variables. Gupta and Choi (2005) proposed the Square-Root-of-Mean-of-Squares (SRMS) method which employs a limited Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the design response of the secondary system statistically. The SRMS approach was illustrated to work well with representative single degree of freedom (SDOF) primary-SDOF secondary systems. In this paper, we study the applicability of SRMS methodology to MDOF primary-MDOF secondary systems. In such systems, two or more modes are likely to have closely spaced frequencies. The individual probability density functions of the closely spaced frequencies overlap with each other. Simulation of such closely spaced frequencies as independent random can give incorrect set of frequencies in the sense that the frequencies do not remain as ordered sets. Rejection of these incorrect sets does not resolve the problem as the simulated density functions no longer maintain the originally assumed distribution. The simulation of ordered sets of natural frequencies of an MDOF structure can be achieved by using a joint density function that considers the necessary constraints. The SRMS method for MDOF primary-MDOF secondary coupled systems is modified by incorporating a closed-form formulation for the joint density function of closely spaced frequencies. The modified SRMS approach is validated for MDOF secondary systems that are both singly as well as multiply connected to the MDOF primary system.     

Combination of modal responses: A closed-form formulation for rigid response coefficient

Recent studies conducted by US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) for combining modal responses in a response spectrum method of seismic analysis and design have emphasized that each modal response quantity should be separated into damped-periodic and rigid parts before combining the contributions from different modes. The damped-periodic parts of modal responses are combined using the double-sum equation whereas the rigid parts are combined algebraically. A particular modal response quantity is separated into damped-periodic and rigid parts using the “rigid response coefficient”. The USNRC sponsored study recommends the calculation of rigid response coefficient by either the Lindley–Yow approach or Gupta method. While Lindley–Yow's method has a heuristic basis and gives incorrect results in low frequency region, Gupta's method is based on numerical studies of free-field earthquake motions and works well in the frequency regions of interest for a free-field ground motion. A closed-form solution was developed by Hahn and Valenti in 1997 using a frequency domain approach. With appropriate simplifications, their work can be shown to result in an expression which is very similar to that given by Gupta. It must be noted that the earthquake input to the secondary systems such as piping and equipment is defined by a floor motion and not a free-field ground motion. The frequency characteristics of a floor motion are very different from those of a free-field ground motion. In this paper, we study the validity of existing formulations for the case of floor motions and develop a closed-form solution based on a time domain approach to explain the behavior of rigid response coefficient. The formulation is then used to explain the nature of variation in rigid response coefficient for ground as well as floor motions. It is shown that the proposed formulation and its simplified form gives results that are identical to those evaluated numerically in the complete frequency region of interest.     

Ultrasonic behavior of plastically deformed and heat treated steel

Studies were made on the longitudinal ultrasonic velocity and its attenuation characteristics in medium carbon steel forging subjected to 0–60% hot upsetting followed by heat treatment. The fineness of ferrite and pearlite increased with increasing deformation and cooling rate during heat treatment. The area fraction of pearlite increased from 21% to 45% as well as the mean interlamellar spacing in pearlite decreased from 8.79 μm to 0.689 μm in the 40% deformed (upsetted) normalized sample It was observed that the ultrasonic velocity decreased with increasing degree of deformation. The velocity was found to be highest in the normalized steel acquiring a value of 5920 m/s and lowest in hardened steel acquiring a value of 4979 m/s. The attenuation decreased with increasing deformation resulting in increased back wall echo heights. The residual stresses on the surface of typical 60% deformed and annealed steel samples using x-ray diffractometry were measured to be — 39.7 MPa (compressive) and — 188.0 MPa (compressive) respectively.