Database machines in support of very large databases

Software database management systems were developed in response to the needs of early data processing applications. Database machine research developed as a result of certain performance deficiencies of these software systems. This thesis discusses the history of database machines designed to improve the performance of database processing and focuses primarily on the Teradata DBC/1012, the only successfully marketed database machine that supports very large databases today. Also reviewed is the response of IBM to the performance needs of its database customers; this response has been in terms of improvements in both software and hardware support for database processing. In conclusion, an analysis is made of the future of database machines, in particular the DBC/1012, in light of recent IBM enhancements and its immense customer base

Actes des Sixièmes journées nationales du Groupement De Recherche CNRS du Génie de la Programmation et du Logiciel

National audienceCe document contient les actes des Sixièmes journées nationales du Groupement De Recherche CNRS du Génie de la Programmation et du Logiciel (GDR GPL) s'étant déroulées au CNAM à Paris du 11 au 13 juin 2014. Les contributions présentées dans ce document ont été sélectionnées par les différents groupes de travail du GDR. Il s'agit de résumés, de nouvelles versions, de posters et de démonstrations qui correspondent à des travaux qui ont déjà été validés par les comités de programmes d'autres conférences et revues et dont les droits appartiennent exclusivement à leurs auteurs

Brain Network Connectivity in Anaesthesia and Disorders of Consciousness

Until recently, understanding the nature of consciousness was considered a philosophical pursuit. However, technological developments in brain imaging have allowed the study of consciousness as a natural, neurobiological phenomenon. The neurobiology of consciousness has been studied using cognitive and behavioural testing in healthy volunteers and by examining how brain function and connectivity is altered in various clinical settings. The focus of this thesis is to use two of these clinical settings, pharmacologically-induced sedation and disorders of consciousness (DOC), as experimental models for measuring changes in connectivity patterns associated with alterations in consciousness. Experiment 1 presents a method for improving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data pre-processing to measure brain network connectivity more accurately. This pre-processing method is then applied to the analyses in the remainder of the thesis. Experiment 2 focuses on a fMRI dataset in which healthy volunteers were administered propofol, an anaesthetic drug known to act on inhibitory GABAergic interneurons. Using a novel multimodal analysis, changes in functional brain network connectivity in default mode, salience, and frontoparietal control networks were found to correlate with the cortical distribution of parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons. Using the same dataset, Experiment 3 identified a relationship between structural and functional networks in connections between default mode and salience networks. Similar results have been reported in non-human primate models, however, this is the first study to find network-specific structure-function relationships during sedation in humans. These findings informed the remainder of the thesis, which focused on developing network-based machine learning methods for examining brain connectivity in patients with DOC. Experiment 4 developed and validated a graph convolutional neural network (GCNN) classifier using fMRI data and functional connectivity from healthy volunteers performing a volitional mental imagery task. Experiment 5 applied the GCNN to patients with DOC and found frontoparietal control network connectivity measured at rest to be most important in classifying patients capable of performing the mental imagery task. Taken together, these results contribute to the improvement of brain network analysis techniques, the understanding of the neurobiology of propofol-induced sedation, and the development of machine learning algorithms to identify DOC patients with preserved covert volitional capacity. This work demonstrates the utility of clinical models in deepening our understanding of the neurobiology of consciousness

Business information requirements for the performance management of aseptic dispensing in the national health service

The purpose of this research is to determine the information to be collected for aseptic dispensing in NHS hospitals, and its use for management and business purposes in relation to capacity, demand, performance and efficiency. Mixed methodologies were adopted on an exploratory basis. Qualitative methods included: regular expert input; workshops; out-turn questionnaires; Affinity Analysis; surveys; and structured interviews. Quantitative methods included: activity data surveys; targeted surveys; and Delphi methods. The research systematised the collection and collation of the required data and determined novel ways of analysing and manipulating it to aid decision-making. These were used to evaluate the impact of major capital investment and variations in practices between different parts of the country. A benchmarking approach should be applied in utilising the data and statistical indicators. Nomenclature issues can influence data quality. Therefore clear, unambiguous guidance was developed for data collection. Existing pharmaceutical information systems will be the main sources of the data for the foreseeable future. The research focused on the North West of England, with successful application in the West Midlands. Its transferability to non-NHS and foreign hospitals is inferred, as long as similar operational arrangements apply. The research enables: the measurement of progress towards implementing the Breckenridge (1996) recommendations; the evaluation of performance for aseptic production and usage to inform capacity planning; and the presentation of the degree of collaboration between hospitals. The research addresses the absence of set data for an important hospital support service, and applies relevant lessons from other fields and industries. It enables a systematic approach to capacity planning and performance evaluation, at a time when the contribution of the service to support clinical governance is being fully recognised

Global environmental governance: the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

"This discussion paper is about the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) - one of the multilateral agreements that came out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. UNCCD is based on a conceptualization of international relations that transcends to a large extent the traditional notions of inter-governmental treaties. Such policy concepts are known under the framework of Global Governance as they allocate political action rather to the horizontal level - implying multi-actor-networks and the civil society - than to vertical or top-down processes. The paper first shows that - inspired by the Brundtland Report and the emerging process of globalization - Rio was the peak season for Global Governance concepts that found their way into treaties and triggered structural reform, thus shaping a different reality of multilateral cooperation. In a second step, the paper shows that the Convention to Combat Desertification is the most Global Governance oriented of all of UNCED's outcomes. Its legally binding text contains a number of pertinent elements, ranging from a stringent cross-over of environment and development issues, via the ąbottom-up approach', to a mix of policy tools such as mainstreamed national action programmes and partnership agreements." (author's abstract)Gegenstand der Untersuchung ist die UN-Konvention zur Bekämpfung der Desertifikation (UNCCD). Sie zählt zu den multilateralen Übereinkünften, die im Zuge der 1992 in Rio de Janeiro veranstalteten UN-Konferenz über Umwelt und Entwicklung (UNCED) geschlossen wurden. Die UNCCD basiert auf einem Konzept internationaler Beziehungen, das zu einem großen Teil jenseits traditioneller Vorstellungen von Verträgen zwischen Regierungen angesiedelt ist. Solche auch als Global Governance bezeichneten Politikkonzepte sind eher horizontal als vertikal orientiert und beziehen Akteurnetzwerken und Zivilgesellschaft ein. Ausgehend vom Brundtland-Report und dem sich entwickelnden Prozess der Globalisierung zeigt der Verfasser, dass Rio den Höhepunkt für Global Governance-Konzepte war; diese Konzepte fanden ihren Niederschlag in Verträgen und setzten strukturelle Reformprozesse in Gang, die eine neue Form multilateraler Zusammenarbeit schufen. Von allen Ergebnissen, die die UNCED zeitigte, ist die UNCCD am meisten auf Global Governance orientiert. Ihr rechtlich verbindlicher Vertragstext enthält eine Reihe entsprechender Elemente, so die Verbindung von Umwelt- und Entwicklungsfragen, einen bottom-up-Ansatz und einen Mix von Politikinstrumenten wie nationale Aktionsprogramme und Partnerschaftsvereinbarungen. (ICEÜbers

An approach to task coordination for hyperflexible robotic workcells

2014 - 2015The manufacturing industry is very diverse and covers a wide range of specific processes ranging from extracting minerals to assembly of very complex products such as planes or computers, with all intermediate processing steps in a long chain of industrial suppliers and customers. It is well know that the introduction of robots in manufacturing industries has many advantages. Basically, in relation to human labor, robots work to a constant level of quality. For example, waste, scrap and rework are minimized. Furthermore they can work in areas that are hazardous or unpleasant to humans. Robots are advantageous where strength is required, and in many applications they are also faster than humans. Also, in relation to special-purpose dedicated equipment, robots are more easily reprogrammed to cope with new products or changes in the design of existing ones. In the last 30-40 years, large enterprises in high-volume markets have managed to remain competitive and maintain qualified jobs by increasing their productivity with the incremental adoption and use of advanced ICT and robotics technologies. In the 70s, robots have been introduced for the automation of a wide spectrum of tasks such as: assembly of cars, white goods, electronic devices, machining of metal and plastic parts, and handling of workpieces and objects of all kinds. Robotics has thus soon become a synonym for competitive manufacturing and a key contributing technology for strengthening the economic base of Europe . So far, the automotive and electronics industries and their supply chains are the main users of robot systems and are accounting for more than 60% of the total annual robot sales. Robotic technologies have thus mainly been driven by the needs of these high-volume market industries. The degree of automation in the automotive industries is expected to increase in the future as robots will push the limits towards flexibility regarding faster change-over-times of different product types (through rapid programming generation schemes), capabilities to deal with tolerances (through an extensive use of sensors) and costs (by reducing customized work-cell installations and reuse of manufacturing equipment). There are numerous new fields of applications in which robot technology is not widespread today due to its lack of flexibility and high costs involved when dealing with varying lot sizes and variable product geometries. In such cases, hyper-flexible robotic work cells can help in providing flexibility to the system and making it adaptable to the different dynamic production requirements. Hyper-flexible robotic work cells, in fact, can be composed of sets of industrial robotic manipulators that cooperate to achieve the production step that characterize the work cell; they can be programmed and re-programmed to achieve a wide class of operations and they may result versatile to perform different kind of tasks Related key technology challenges for pursuing successful long-term industrial robot automation are introduced at three levels: basic technologies, robot components and systems integration. On a systems integration level, the main challenges lie in the development of methods and tools for instructing and synchronising the operation of a group of cooperative robots at the shop-floor. Furthermore, the development of the concept of hyper flexible manufacturing systems implies soon the availability of: consistent middleware for automation modules to seamlessly connect robots, peripheral devices and industrial IT systems without reprogramming everything (”plug-and-play”) . In this thesis both innovative and traditional industrial robot applications will be analyzed from the point of view of task coordination. In the modeling environment, contribution of this dissertation consists in presenting a new methodology to obtain a model oriented to the control the sequencing of the activities of a robotic hyperflexible cell. First a formal model using the Colored Modified Hybrid Petri Nets (CMHPN) is presented. An algorithm is provided to obtain an automatic synthesis of the CMHPN of a robotic cell with detail attention to aircraft industry. It is important to notice that the CMHPN is used to model the cell behaviour at a high level of abstraction. It models the activities of each cell component and its coordination by a supervisory system. As more, an object oriented approach and supervisory control are proposed to implement industrial automation control systems (based on Programmable Logic Controllers) to meet the new challenges of this field capability to implement applications involving widely distributed devices and high reuse of software components. Hence a method is proposed to implement both controllers and supervisors designed by Petri Nets on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) using Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Finally preliminary results about a novel cyber-physical approach to the design of automated warehouse systems is presented. [edited by author]XIV n.s

Mitigating the effects of climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa via an effective international legal standard: a case study of Nigeria

The world grapples with the scourge of climate change and is threatening greater consequences, with the developing countries suffering the effects more than the developed countries. This study identifies the causes of this in the sub-Saharan Africa as low-level of awareness of climate change, non-implementation of environmental regulations where available, low-level of development, corruption and lack of technology to cope with the situation. The study seeks to identify the basic issues required to mitigate the effects in the sub-Saharan Africa, as above stated, proposing the creation and implementation of an effective international legal norm as in the case of the European Union, which employed common regional regulations and policies on climate change and the environment in general, thus bringing the region to the fore-front on climate change. it emphasises common legal and policies enforcement across the region as a sure panacea to improving its situation. The study adopts Nigeria as a case study for the region, being an influencial and regional leader, and a major contributor to world's carbon emission as an oil-producing country

Examining the Relationships Between Distance Education Students’ Self-Efficacy and Their Achievement

This study aimed to examine the relationships between students’ self-efficacy (SSE) and students’ achievement (SA) in distance education. The instruments were administered to 100 undergraduate students in a distance university who work as migrant workers in Taiwan to gather data, while their SA scores were obtained from the university. The semi-structured interviews for 8 participants consisted of questions that showed the specific conditions of SSE and SA. The findings of this study were reported as follows: There was a significantly positive correlation between targeted SSE (overall scales and general self-efficacy) and SA. Targeted students' self-efficacy effectively predicted their achievement; besides, general self- efficacy had the most significant influence. In the qualitative findings, four themes were extracted for those students with lower self-efficacy but higher achievement—physical and emotional condition, teaching and learning strategy, positive social interaction, and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, three themes were extracted for those students with moderate or higher self-efficacy but lower achievement—more time for leisure (not hard-working), less social interaction, and external excuses. Providing effective learning environments, social interactions, and teaching and learning strategies are suggested in distance education