A review of key planning and scheduling in the rail industry in Europe and UK

Planning and scheduling activities within the rail industry have benefited from developments in computer-based simulation and modelling techniques over the last 25 years. Increasingly, the use of computational intelligence in such tasks is featuring more heavily in research publications. This paper examines a number of common rail-based planning and scheduling activities and how they benefit from five broad technology approaches. Summary tables of papers are provided relating to rail planning and scheduling activities and to the use of expert and decision systems in the rail industry.EPSR

Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for June to December 2011

This potpourri of educational technology conferences includes gems such as “Saving Your Organisation from Boring eLearning” and “Lessons and Insights from Ten eLearning Masters”. And, if you wish, you can “Be an Open Learning Hero”. You will also find that the number of mobile learning conferences (and conferences that have a mobile learning component) have increased significantly. Countries such as China, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand have shown a keen interest in mobile learning. It would be impossible for you to be present at all the conferences that you would like to attend. But, you could go to the conference website/url during and after the conference. Many conference organizers post abstracts, full papers, and/or videos of conference presentations. Thus, you can visit the conference virtually and may encounter information and contacts that would be useful in your work. The list below covers selected events focused primarily on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2011 are complete as dates, locations, or URLs are not available for a number of events held after December 2011. But, take a look at the conference organizers who planned ahead in 2012. A Word 2003 format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 or higher version and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference proceedings. (If you are seeking a more interactive listing, refer to online conference sites.) Consider using the “Find” tool under Microsoft Word’s “Edit” tab or similar tab in OpenOffice to locate the name of a particular conference, association, city, or country. If you enter the country “Australia” or “Singapore” in the “Find” tool, all conferences that occur in Australia or Singapore will be highlighted. Or, enter the word “research”. Then, “cut and paste” a list of suitable events for yourself and your colleagues. Please note that events, dates, titles, and locations may change; thus, CHECK the specific conference website. Note also that some events will be cancelled at a later date. All Internet addresses were verified at the time of publication. No liability is assumed for any errors that may have been introduced inadvertently during the assembly of this conference list. If possible, do not remove the contact information when you re-distribute the list as that is how I receive updates and corrections. If you mount the list on the web, please note its source

Positionnement des systèmes multi-agents pour les systèmes de transport intelligents

National audienceThe use of new information and communication technologies has become a central solution to improve transport systems. What has led to which is called the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Societal challenges for ensuring their effective implementations are crucial both to respond to users needs, and to design sustainable transport systems. In this paper, we argue that multi-agent paradigm can address the needs of this domain. We introduce ITS, and we emphasize three main issues of ITS which are how to ensure its functionality, how to render it more "intelligent" despite constraints in scalability, and the ethical implications. Some selected research works are provided to illustrate these issuesL’utilisation des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication pour l’amélioration des systèmes de transport est une solution devenue centrale dans le domaine du transport. Le résultat est ce que l’on appelle les systèmes de transport intelligents (STI). Les enjeux sociétaux de leur mise en œuvre sont cruciaux en termes de réponse aux besoins des usagers mais également pour la conception de systèmes de transports durables. Dans ce papier, nous défendons l’idée que le paradigme multi-agent peut répondre aux besoins de ce domaine. Nous proposons ainsi de présenter le domaine des STI et de focaliser notre attention sur trois problématiques : la manière d’assurer sa fonctionnalité, la manière de le rendre plus « intelligent » malgré des contraintes de passage à l’échelle, et enfin ses conséquences éthiques. Quelques travaux de recherche illustrent notre propos

Augmented and virtual reality evolution and future tendency

Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are increasing in popularity. Augmented reality has thrived to date mainly on mobile applications, with games like Pokémon Go or the new Google Maps utility as some of its ambassadors. On the other hand, virtual reality has been popularized mainly thanks to the videogame industry and cheaper devices. However, what was initially a failure in the industrial field is resurfacing in recent years thanks to the technological improvements in devices and processing hardware. In this work, an in-depth study of the different fields in which augmented and virtual reality have been used has been carried out. This study focuses on conducting a thorough scoping review focused on these new technologies, where the evolution of each of them during the last years in the most important categories and in the countries most involved in these technologies will be analyzed. Finally, we will analyze the future trend of these technologies and the areas in which it is necessary to investigate to further integrate these technologies into society.Universidad de Sevilla, Spain Telefonica Chair “Intelligence in Networks

A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis on Social Network Anonymization: Current Approaches and Future Directions

In recent decades, social network anonymization has become a crucial research field due to its pivotal role in preserving users' privacy. However, the high diversity of approaches introduced in relevant studies poses a challenge to gaining a profound understanding of the field. In response to this, the current study presents an exhaustive and well-structured bibliometric analysis of the social network anonymization field. To begin our research, related studies from the period of 2007-2022 were collected from the Scopus Database then pre-processed. Following this, the VOSviewer was used to visualize the network of authors' keywords. Subsequently, extensive statistical and network analyses were performed to identify the most prominent keywords and trending topics. Additionally, the application of co-word analysis through SciMAT and the Alluvial diagram allowed us to explore the themes of social network anonymization and scrutinize their evolution over time. These analyses culminated in an innovative taxonomy of the existing approaches and anticipation of potential trends in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first bibliometric analysis in the social network anonymization field, which offers a deeper understanding of the current state and an insightful roadmap for future research in this domain.Comment: 73 pages, 28 figure

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

[DE] World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J.; Canovas Solbes, A.; García-García, L. (2017). Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 9(1-2):85-125. doi:10.5296/npa.v9i1-2.12412S8512591-

Spatial and temporal-based query disambiguation for improving web search

Queries submitted to search engines are ambiguous in nature due to users’ irrelevant input which poses real challenges to web search engines both towards understanding a query and giving results. A lot of irrelevant and ambiguous information creates disappointment among users. Thus, this research proposes an ambiguity evolvement process followed by an integrated use of spatial and temporal features to alleviate the search results imprecision. To enhance the effectiveness of web information retrieval the study develops an enhanced Adaptive Disambiguation Approach for web search queries to overcome the problems caused by ambiguous queries. A query classification method was used to filter search results to overcome the imprecision. An algorithm was utilized for finding the similarity of the search results based on spatial and temporal features. Users’ selection based on web results facilitated recording of implicit feedback which was then utilized for web search improvement. Performance evaluation was conducted on data sets GISQC_DS, AMBIENT and MORESQUE comprising of ambiguous queries to certify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to a well-known temporal evaluation and two-box search methods. The implemented prototype is focused on ambiguous queries to be classified by spatial or temporal features. Spatial queries focus on targeting the location information whereas temporal queries target time in years. In conclusion, the study used search results in the context of Spatial Information Retrieval (S-IR) along with temporal information. Experiments results show that the use of spatial and temporal features in combination can significantly improve the performance in terms of precision (92%), accuracy (93%), recall (95%), and f-measure (93%). Moreover, the use of implicit feedback has a significant impact on the search results which has been demonstrated through experimental evaluation.SHAHID KAMA

O Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) enquanto instrumento de regulação das políticas educativas de Macau

Esta tese de doutoramento investiga na Região Administrativa Especial de Macau (RAEM) o impacto nas políticas educativas do “Programme for International Student Assessment” (PISA), promovido pela Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Económico (OCDE), identificado como instrumento de regulação, produtor de conhecimento e ao mesmo tempo regulador das ações dos diversos atores que participam direta ou indiretamente na educação. A tese filia-se na abordagem das políticas sob a perspetiva da ação pública, tomando os fenómenos de receção e uso do PISA como um analisador dos efeitos - e dos limites dos efeitos - da regulação transnacional no contexto da RAEM. A investigação tem como objetivos conhecer as reações dos diversos atores responsáveis pela definição das políticas públicas em Macau (Governo e Assembleia Legislativa, responsáveis da Administração Pública, em particular a Direção dos Serviços de Educação e Juventude, Escolas, direção e professores), aos resultados dos estudantes da RAEM, e a sua repercussão junto dos órgãos de comunicação social, em língua Chinesa, Portuguesa e Inglesa. Tomando por base esse estudo conhecer qual o impacto do PISA nas políticas públicas de educação em Macau. No trabalho de investigação recorreu-se a uma metodologia qualitativa. Trata-se, assim, de um estudo naturalista, descritivo o qual assume uma abordagem interpretativa. A análise dos dados da investigação realizada permitiu-nos concluir que a participação de Macau no PISA teve impacto nas políticas públicas de educação em Macau, influenciando os modos de regulação institucional do ensino não-superior, evoluindo da regulação burocrática para a pós-burocrática. O PISA é um instrumento apropriado pelos atores que transformaram e adaptaram a política aos seus interesses e quadros cognitivos e normativos e, ainda, que o PISA é um instrumento de regulação transnacional, soft, compósito, que encerra influências dos níveis global, nacional e local.This Doctoral Thesis investigates, at Macau’s Special Administrative Region, the impact on the educational politics from the “Programme for International Students Assessment” (PISA), which is promoted by the Organization for Cooperation and Development of the Economy (OCDE), identified as an instrument of regulation, producer of knowledge and simultaneously a regulator of the actions from the diverse actors that participate, directly or indirectly, in education. The Thesis affiliates in the approach of the politics under the perspective of public action, taking the reception phenomena and the usage of PISA as an analyzer of the effects – and the effects limits – from the transnational regulation in the context of MSAR. This investigation work has per objectives knowing the reactions of the diverse responsible actors for the definition of public policies in Macau (Government, Legislative Council, Public Administration Responsible, in particular the Direction of Youth and Education Services, Schools, Direction and Teachers) to PISA´s results at MSAR and its repercussions along the Social Media in Chinese, Portuguese and English languages. Having this Study per basis, knowing what is the impact of PISA in the Public Policies of Education in Macau. It is, like this, about a naturalistic study, descriptive which assumes an interpretative approach. The analysis of the investigation data gathered has allowed us to conclude that the participation of Macau in Pisa´s has had an impact in the public policies of education in Macau, influencing the ways of institutionally regulating the public policies towards non superior level education, evolving from the bureaucratic regulation to the post bureaucratic. Pisa is an appropriate tool used by the actors who transformed and adapted the policy to their interests and cognitive frames and standard, and, as well, Pisa is an instrument of transnational regulation, soft, composite , that encloses/contains influences on global, national and local levels

A review of household water demand management and consumption measurement

Rapid population growth and economic prosperity among other factors are exacerbating existing water stress in the east and southeast regions of England, hence, the water sector is increasingly shifting focus from the expansion of water sources and increased abstraction to demand-side management (DSM) strategies aimed at improving household water efficiency and reducing per capita consumption. A crucial component of water DSM strategy is a good understanding of household water use patterns and the myriad factors that influence them. Smart metering, conflated with innovative techniques and groundbreaking ancillaries continue to support DSM strategies by providing quasi-real-time data, offering powerful insights into household water consumption patterns and delivering behaviour-changing feedback to consumers. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current state of household water consumption and their determinants as reported in the literature. The paper also reviews the methods and techniques for measuring and understanding consumption patterns and discuss prominent DSM instruments utilised in the household water demand sector globally along with their relative impact on per capita consumption (PCC). The review concludes that while disaggregation remains a very effective means of revealing consumption patterns at micro-component levels, the process is time-consuming and costly, relying on high-resolution data, specific hardware and software combination, making it difficult to incorporate into the utility’s routine DSM framework. A future research is proposed, that may focus on an alternative, scalable consumption pattern recognition approach that can easily be incorporated into the utility’s DSM strategy using medium resolution smart-meter data