On the usefulness of guidelines and instructions for environmental assessment – a qualitative study of the helpfulness perceived by Polish practitioners

Guidelines and instructions for Environmental Impact Assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment (together referred to as EA here) are developed to improve the quality of legal requirements’ implementation and to support EA procedure accomplishment. However, to date, it has not been checked whether they are useful for practitioners. Therefore, the aim of the study underlying this paper was to verify, based on the experience of Polish EA experts, whether guidelines and instructions are useful in their everyday work. A qualitative study comprising of a questionnaire survey and interviews tested whether (1) EA practitioners know and use the Polish and EU guidelines, (2) how EA practitioners evaluate the validity and usefulness of such instructions, and (3) in which areas there is a lack of instructions and guidelines. The results show a low level of knowledge of national and EU handbooks. Those guidelines focusing on legal procedures, road investments and designing animal passageways are considered to be the most useful. Moreover, practitioners indicate that EU guidelines should be translated into Polish. Most important for practitioners is the linking of guidelines with the EA procedure, so that they can become a platform for dialogue of all stakeholders.     

Low-Dimensional Perturb-and-MAP Approach for Learning Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Neural Processing Letters - This paper introduces a new approach to maximum likelihood learning of the parameters of a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). The proposed method is based on the...     

Sampled suffix array with minimizers

Sampling (evenly) the suffixes from the suffix array is an old idea trading the pattern search time for reduced index space. A few years ago Claude et al. showed an alphabet sampling scheme allowing for more efficient pattern searches compared with the sparse suffix array, for long enough patterns. A drawback of their approach is the requirement that sought patterns need to contain at least one character from the chosen subalphabet. In this work, we propose an alternative suffix sampling approach with only a minimum pattern length as a requirement, which is more convenient in practice. Experiments show that our algorithm (in a few variants) achieves competitive time‐space tradeoffs on most standard benchmark data. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Bloom filter based semi‐index on q‐grams

We present a simple q‐gram based semi‐index, which allows to look for a pattern typically only in a small fraction of text blocks. Several space‐time tradeoffs are presented. Experiments on Pizza & Chili datasets show that our solution is up to three orders of magnitude faster than the Claude et al. (Journal of Discrete Algorithms 2012; 11 :37) semi‐index at a comparable space usage. Moreover, the construction of our data structure is fast and easily parallelizable. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning Detail Transfer based on Geometric Features

The visual richness of computer graphics applications is frequently limited by the difficulty of obtaining high‐quality, detailed 3D models. This paper proposes a method for realistically transferring details (specifically, displacement maps) from existing high‐quality 3D models to simple shapes that may be created with easy‐to‐learn modeling tools. Our key insight is to use metric learning to find a combination of geometric features that successfully predicts detail‐map similarities on the source mesh; we use the learned feature combination to drive the detail transfer. The latter uses a variant of multi‐resolution non‐parametric texture synthesis, augmented by a high‐frequency detail transfer step in texture space. We demonstrate that our technique can successfully transfer details among a variety of shapes including furniture and clothing.     

The use of the internet by older adults in Poland

Universal Access in the Information Society - It is generally accepted that it is young people who are particularly interested in information and communication technologies (ICT). Older adults...     

Exfoliated CrPS4 with Promising Photoconductivity

Layered semiconductors have attracted significant attention due to their diverse physical properties controlled by composition and the number of stacked layers. Herein, large crystals of the ternary layered semiconductor chromium thiophosphate (CrPS₄) are prepared by a vapor transport synthesis. Optical properties are determined using photoconduction, absorption, photoreflectance, and photoacoustic spectroscopy exposing the semiconducting properties of the material. A simple, one‐step protocol for mechanical exfoliation onto a transmission electron microscope grid is developed, and multiple layers are characterized by advanced electron microscopy methods, including atomic resolution elemental mapping confirming the structure by directly showing the positions of the columns of different elements' atoms. CrPS₄ is also liquid exfoliated, and in combination with colloidal graphene, an ink‐jet‐printed photodetector is created. This all‐printed graphene/CrPS₄/graphene heterostructure detector demonstrates a specific detectivity of 8.3 × 10⁸ (D*). This study shows a potential application of both bulk crystal and individual flakes of CrPS₄ as active components in light detection, when introduced as ink‐printable moieties with a large benefit for manufacturing.     

Multithreaded computing in evolutionary design and in artificial life simulations

This article investigates low-level and high-level multithreaded performance of evolutionary processes that are typically employed in evolutionary design and artificial life. Computations performed in these areas are specific because evaluation of each genotype usually involves time-consuming simulation of virtual environments and physics. Computational experiments have been conducted using the Framsticks simulator running a multithreaded version of a standard evolutionary experiment. Tests carried out on five diverse machines and two operating systems demonstrated how low-level performance depends on the number of physical and logical CPU cores and on the number of threads. Two string implementations have been compared, and their raw performance turned out to fundamentally differ in a multithreading setup. To improve high-level performance of parallel evolutionary algorithms, i.e. the quality of optimized solutions, a new distribution scheme that is especially useful and efficient for complex representations of solutions—the convection distribution—has been introduced. This new distribution scheme has been compared against a random distribution of genotypes among threads that carry out evolutionary processes.     

Enabling autonomicity in wireless mesh networks with the ETSI AFI GANA reference model

The distributed nature of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) allows them to benefit from multiple autonomic functionalities. However, the existing landscape of self‐x solutions (eg, self‐configuration) is fragmented and the lack of a standardized framework through which interoperable autonomics can be developed has been hampering adoption and deployment of autonomics in real‐world service networks. There is a need for a standardized architectural framework that enables to comprehensively support and integrate interoperable components for autonomicity in WMNs. Such an architecture (autonomicity‐enabled wireless mesh architecture) is currently being standardized by the working group called Evolution of Management towards Autonomic Future Internet (AFI) in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute within the Network Technologies Technical Committee. The proposed autonomic wireless mesh architecture is an instantiation of the AFI GANA (Generic Autonomic Network Architecture) reference model, a standards‐based approach to autonomics. This paper complements and extends the early version of the architecture by further detailing the architectural principles and providing experimental and validation results. First, we provide a brief overview of the AFI GANA reference model and then show how each of its building blocks can be instantiated for WMNs. We evaluate the proposed architecture by implementing and testing the 4 basic self‐x functionalities defined by the GANA model. The provided guidelines can now help researchers and engineers build autonomicity‐enabled WMNs using a standardized framework that enables adoption and deployment of autonomics by industry, thereby enabling researchers and engineers to contribute to the further evolution of the standard in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.