Performance evaluation of ambient services by combining robotic frameworks and a smart environment platform

Mobile robots and smart environments are two areas of research that can easily profit from each other. Smart environments, which are spaces unobtrusively equipped with sensors and actuators, providing ambient services to the people living within. Mobile robots inside those smart environments can use the existing infrastructure to increase their performance while decreasing the cost of local sensor systems. On the other side, evaluation of ambient services is often a laborious task. This work presents an approach that simplifies the evaluation by making use of two frameworks from robotics to perform tests in simulated smart environments. A method based on the language as action principle is used to extract realistic behavior of people living in real-world smart environments. Using this data, many different scenarios with varying configurations (different floor layouts, numbers and types of sensors, different number of people and pets) can easily be simulated and the performance of the ambient services evaluated.     

Evaluating knowledge and capacity development in the water sector: challenges and progress

As knowledge and capacity development (KCD) is increasingly acknowledged as crucial for development, the need to evaluate its impact increases, too. However, evaluating KCD in practice remains a challenge. This article aims to synthesize the current wisdom on the topic of KCD evaluation in the water sector. We discuss two leading approaches to KCD (positivist and complex adaptive systems) and their associated evaluation paradigms, the major methodological challenges facing KCD evaluation, and progress made in that respect. The article provides insights for KCD practitioners and policy makers in the water sector that can help them improve their KCD evaluation practice.     

A Scalable System Architecture for High-Throughput Turbo-Decoders

The need for higher data rates is ever rising as wireless communications standards move from the third to the fourth generation. Turbo-Codes are the prevalent channel codes for wireless systems due to their excellent forward error correction capability. So far research has mainly focused on components of high throughput Turbo-Decoders. In this paper we explore the Turbo-Decoder design space anew, both under system design and deep-submicron implementation aspects. Our approach incorporates all levels of design, from I/O behavior down to floorplaning taking deep-submicron effects into account. Its scalability allows to derive optimized architectures tailored to the given throughput and target technology. We present results for 3GPP compliant Turbo-Decoders beyond 100 Mbit/s synthesized on a 0.18 μm standard cell library.     

Stakeholder engagement in water governance as social learning: lessons from practice

ABSTRACT

The OECD Principles on Water Governance set out various requirements for stakeholder engagement. Coupled with conceptualizations of social learning, this article asks how we define and enact stakeholder engagement and explores the actual practice of engagement of stakeholders in three fields of water governance. The results suggest that a key consideration is the purpose of the stakeholder engagement, requiring consideration of its ethics, process, roles and expected outcomes. While facilitators cannot be held accountable if stakeholder engagement ‘fails’ in terms of social learning, they are responsible for ensuring that the enabling conditions for social learning are met.     

Correction to: Efficient Hardware Architectures for 1D- and MD-LSTM Networks

Journal of Signal Processing Systems -     

A Customized Many-Core Hardware Acceleration Platform for Short Read Mapping Problems Using Distributed Memory Interface with 3D–Stacked Architecture

Rapidly developing Next Generation Sequencing technologies produce huge amounts of short reads that consisting randomly fragmented DNA base pair strings. Assembling of those short reads poses a challenge on the mapping of reads to a reference genome in terms of both sensitivity and execution time. In this paper, we propose a customized many-core hardware acceleration platform for short read mapping problems based on hash-index method. The processing core is highly customized to suite both 2-hit string matching and banded Smith-Waterman sequence alignment operations, while distributed memory interface with 3D–stacked architecture provides high bandwidth and low access latency for highly customized dataset partitioning and memory access scheduling. Conformal with original BFAST program, our design provides an amazingly 45,012 times speedup over software approach for single-end short reads and 21,102 times for paired-end short reads, while also beats similar single FPGA solution for 1466 times in case of single end reads. Optimized seed generation gives much better sensitivity while the performance boost is still impressive.     

The Siemens high-level synthesis system CALLAS

In this paper we present the Siemens high-level synthesis system CALLAS and describe its design methodology and synthesis strategy. It supports the synthesis of control-dominated applications and uses a VHDL subset for the algorithmic specification. Its main feature can be characterized as “What you simulate is what you synthesize.” This principle permits a validation of the synthesis results by simulation or even formal verification. CALLAS has been successfully applied on real designs which were implemented in silicon. These examples demonstrate that CALLAS fulfils the constraints and objectives of a hardware designer. The circuits are comparable in quality to results achieved by synthesis starting at the register-transfer-level     

Contribution to the solution of the linear-quadratic problem forlarge systems

The feasibility of using a previously published algorithm as a tool for the computation of the Kalman gain for large systems is demonstrated. Some aspects of its implementation and its numerical properties are explored. Numerical examples demonstrate the suitability of the algorithm for the computation of the optimal gain for very-high-order systems. The optimal gain is computed for a sparse system with 401 states     

Turbo-decoding without SNR estimation

Theoretically, it is necessary to estimate the SNR when using a MAP of the log-MAP constituent decoder. The effect of an SNR mismatch on the bit error rate performance of turbo-codes and the design of good variance estimators have been addressed by several authors. In this letter we study the SNR sensitivity of turbo-decoding with log-MAP and max-log-MAP constituent decoders respectively for AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. Our theoretical and simulation results indicate that an estimation of the SNR is not necessary from a practical point of view. Our setup is aligned with decoder implementation aspects of future mobile communication systems     

Policy factors explaining the failure of delegated management in water supply: evidence from Ghana

In the 1990s, delegated management emerged as a promising public policy approach for improving the performance of the water supply sector in many developing countries. In many cases, however, the obligations of delegated management contracts reportedly have not been met, often leading to early termination or non-renewal. Drawing on theories in policy analysis and knowledge management, this article analyzes the management contract signed between Ghana Water Company and Aqua Vitens Rand to identify the policy-related factors underlying the failure of delegated management in water supply. Practical implications are discussed for more successful implementation of delegated management.