Multi-sensor Fusion Based on Asymmetric Decision Weighting for Robust Activity Recognition

Neural Processing Letters - The recognition of human activity has been deeply explored during the recent years. However, most proposed solutions are mainly devised to operate in ideal conditions,...     

A programmable optical network testbed in support of C-RAN: a reliability study

With both mobile network services and related data traffic volume on the rise, reliability of the radio access network is of the essence. A number of radio functional splits are defined by 3GPP to offer increased flexibility of implementation and feasibility of new mobile network services. For example, it is possible to implement certain radio functions in the Cloud, an architectural solution referred to as C-RAN. C-RAN solutions require highly reliable backhaul and fronthaul network designs. This paper describes PROnet, a programmable optical software-defined network testbed, which has been upgraded to offer backhaul and fronthaul transport capabilities in support of C-RAN functionalities with increased reliability. The testbed is upgraded with a specially designed 1 + 1 protection mechanism at the Ethernet layer in order to meet the stringent network round-trip requirements imposed by one of the C-RAN functional split options on the fronthaul.

     

Rotibot: Use of Rotifers as Self‐Propelling Biohybrid Microcleaners

Self‐propelled biohybrid microrobots, employing marine rotifers as their engine, named “rotibot,” are presented and their practical utility and advantages for environmental remediation are demonstrated. Functionalized microbeads are attached electrostatically within the rotifer mouth and aggregated inside their inner lip. The high fluid flow toward the mouth, generated by the strokes of rotifer cilia bands, forces an extremely efficient transport of the contaminated sample over the active surfaces of the functionalized microbeads. The reactive particles confined around the rotifer's lip are thus exposed to a high flow rate of the pollutant solution, resulting in dramatically accelerated decontamination processes, without external mixing or harmful fuels. Theoretical simulations, modeling the greatly enhanced fluid dynamic associated with such built‐in mixing effect, correlate well with the experimental observations. The rotibot thus proves to be an effective, versatile, and robust dynamic microcleaning platform for removing diverse environmental pollutants. Microbeads functionalized with lysozyme and organophosphorus hydrolase enzymes are shown to be extremely useful for enzymatic biodegradation of Escherichia coli and the nerve agent methyl paraoxon, respectively, while ligand (meso‐2,3‐dimercaptosuccinic acid) modified beads are used for removing heavy metal contaminants. Rotifer‐based biohybrid microrobots hold considerable promise as self‐propelling dynamic pumps for diverse large‐scale environmental remediation applications.     

On the cosimulation of multibody systems and hydraulic dynamics

Multibody System Dynamics - The simulation of mechanical devices using multibody system dynamics (MBS) algorithms frequently requires the consideration of their interaction with components of a...     

Modelling effects of S3D visual discomfort in human emotional state using data mining techniques

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In recent years, the rapid development of diverse media has been evident in disparate fields such as consumer electronics, automotive infotainment and healthcare...     

Characterization of the Impact of Hardware Islands on OLTP

Modern hardware is abundantly parallel and increasingly heterogeneous. The numerous processing cores have non-uniform access latencies to the main memory and processor caches, which causes variability in the communication costs. Unfortunately, database systems mostly assume that all processing cores are the same and that microarchitecture differences are not significant enough to appear in critical database execution paths. As we demonstrate in this paper, however, non-uniform core topology does appear in the critical path and conventional database architectures achieve suboptimal and even worse, unpredictable performance. We perform a detailed performance analysis of OLTP deployments in servers with multiple cores per CPU (multicore) and multiple CPUs per server (multisocket). We compare different database deployment strategies where we vary the number and size of independent database instances running on a single server, from a single shared-everything instance to fine-grained shared-nothing configurations. We quantify the impact of non-uniform hardware on various deployments by (a) examining how efficiently each deployment uses the available hardware resources and (b) measuring the impact of distributed transactions and skewed requests on different workloads. We show that no strategy is optimal for all cases and that the best choice depends on the combination of hardware topology and workload characteristics. Finally, we argue that transaction processing systems must be aware of the hardware topology in order to achieve predictably high performance.     

A general RBDO decoupling approach for different reliability analysis methods

There are available in the literature several papers on the development of methods to decouple the reliability analysis and the structural optimization to solve RBDO problems. Most of them focused on strategies that employ the First Order Reliability Method (FORM) to approximate the reliability constraints. Despite of all these developments, one limitation prevailed: the lack of accuracy in the approximation of the reliability constraints due to the use of FORM. Thus, in this paper, a novel approach for RBDO is presented in order to overcome such a limitation. In this approach, we use the concept of shifting vectors, originally developed in the context of the Sequential Optimization and Reliability Assessment (SORA). However, the shifting vectors are found and updated based on a novel strategy. The resulting framework is able to use any technique for the reliability analysis stage, such as Monte Carlo simulation, second order reliability methods, stochastic polynomials, among others. Thus, the proposed approach overcomes the aforementioned limitation of most of RBDO decoupling techniques, which required the use of FORM for reliability analysis. Several examples are analyzed in order to show the effectiveness of the methodology. Focus is given on examples that are poorly solved or even cannot be tackled by FORM based approaches, such as highly nonlinear limit state functions comprised by a maximum operator or problems with discrete random variables. It should be remarked that the proposed approach was not developed to be more computationally efficient than RBDO decoupling strategies based FORM, but to allow the utilization of any, including more accurate, reliability analysis method.     

Context-aware HDR video distribution for mobile devices

Multimedia Tools and Applications - HDR video on mobile devices is in its infancy and there are no solutions yet that can achieve full HDR video reproduction due to computational power limitations....     

Voltage‐Induced Coercivity Reduction in Nanoporous Alloy Films: A Boost toward Energy‐Efficient Magnetic Actuation

Magnetic data storage and magnetically actuated devices are conventionally controlled by magnetic fields generated using electric currents. This involves significant power dissipation by Joule heating effect. To optimize energy efficiency, manipulation of magnetic information with lower magnetic fields (i.e., lower electric currents) is desirable. This can be accomplished by reducing the coercivity of the actuated material. Here, a drastic reduction of coercivity is observed at room temperature in thick (≈600 nm), nanoporous, electrodeposited Cu–Ni films by simply subjecting them to the action of an electric field. The effect is due to voltage‐induced changes in the magnetic anisotropy. The large surface‐area‐to‐volume ratio and the ultranarrow pore walls of the system allow the whole film, and not only the topmost surface, to effectively contribute to the observed magnetoelectric effect. This waives the stringent “ultrathin‐film requirement” from previous studies, where small voltage‐driven coercivity variations were reported. This observation expands the already wide range of applications of nanoporous materials (hitherto in areas like energy storage or catalysis) and it opens new paradigms in the fields of spintronics, computation, and magnetic actuation in general.