Low carbon manufacturing: Characterization, theoretical models and implementation

Today, the rising of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is becoming the crucial factor for global warming especially in industrial sectors. Therefore, the research to reduce carbon intensity and enhance resources utilization in manufacturing industry is starting to be a timely topic. Low carbon manufacturing (LCM) can be referred to the manufacturing process that produces low carbon emissions intensity and uses energy and resources efficiently and effectively during the process as well. In this paper, the concepts of LCM are discussed and the LCM associated theoretical models, characterization and implementation perspective explored. The paper is structured in four parts. Firstly, the conception of low carbon manufacturing is critically reviewed then the characterization of low carbon manufacturing is discussed and formulated. Third part, the theoretical models are developed with initial models by using the theory from supply chain modeling and linear programming solutions (LP). The models show the relationship of resource utilizations and related variables for LCM in two levels: shop-floor and extended supply chain. Finally, the pilot implementations of LCM are discussed with two approaches: desktop or micro machines and devolved manufacturing. The paper is concluded with further discussions on the potential and application of LCM for manufacturing industry

Multimodal Content Analysis for Effective Advertisements on YouTube

The rapid advances in e-commerce and Web 2.0 technologies have greatly increased the impact of commercial advertisements on the general public. As a key enabling technology, a multitude of recommender systems exists which analyzes user features and browsing patterns to recommend appealing advertisements to users. In this work, we seek to study the characteristics or attributes that characterize an effective advertisement and recommend a useful set of features to aid the designing and production processes of commercial advertisements. We analyze the temporal patterns from multimedia content of advertisement videos including auditory, visual and textual components, and study their individual roles and synergies in the success of an advertisement. The objective of this work is then to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement, and to recommend a useful set of features to advertisement designers to make it more successful and approachable to users. Our proposed framework employs the signal processing technique of cross modality feature learning where data streams from different components are employed to train separate neural network models and are then fused together to learn a shared representation. Subsequently, a neural network model trained on this joint feature embedding representation is utilized as a classifier to predict advertisement effectiveness. We validate our approach using subjective ratings from a dedicated user study, the sentiment strength of online viewer comments, and a viewer opinion metric of the ratio of the Likes and Views received by each advertisement from an online platform.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, ICDM 201

The Global Risks Report 2016, 11th Edition

Now in its 11th edition, The Global Risks Report 2016 draws attention to ways that global risks could evolve and interact in the next decade. The year 2016 marks a forceful departure from past findings, as the risks about which the Report has been warning over the past decade are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways and harm people, institutions and economies. Warming climate is likely to raise this year's temperature to 1° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, 60 million people, equivalent to the world's 24th largest country and largest number in recent history, are forcibly displaced, and crimes in cyberspace cost the global economy an estimated US$445 billion, higher than many economies' national incomes. In this context, the Reportcalls for action to build resilience – the "resilience imperative" – and identifies practical examples of how it could be done.The Report also steps back and explores how emerging global risks and major trends, such as climate change, the rise of cyber dependence and income and wealth disparity are impacting already-strained societies by highlighting three clusters of risks as Risks in Focus. As resilience building is helped by the ability to analyse global risks from the perspective of specific stakeholders, the Report also analyses the significance of global risks to the business community at a regional and country-level

Fog Computing in Medical Internet-of-Things: Architecture, Implementation, and Applications

In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life activities impacting one's health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity, data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection.Comment: 29 pages, 30 figures, 5 tables. Keywords: Big Data, Body Area Network, Body Sensor Network, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Medical Cyberphysical Systems, Medical Internet-of-Things, Telecare, Tele-treatment, Wearable Devices, Chapter in Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in Smart Healthcare (2017), Springe

Global Risks 2012, Seventh Edition

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks 2012 report is based on a survey of 469 experts from industry, government, academia and civil society that examines 50 global risks across five categories. The report emphasizes the singular effect of a particular constellation of global risks rather than focusing on a single existential risk. Three distinct constellations of risks that present a very serious threat to our future prosperity and security emerged from a review of this year's set of risks. Includes a special review of the important lessons learned from the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and the subsequent nuclear crisis at Fukushima, Japan. It focuses on therole of leadership, challenges to effective communication in this information age and resilient business models in response to crises of unforeseen magnitude

China's absorptive State: research, innovation and the prospects for China-UK collaboration

China's innovation system is advancing so rapidly in multiple directions that the UK needs to develop a more ambitious and tailored strategy, able to maximise opportunities and minimise risks across the diversity of its innovation links to China. For the UK, the choice is not whether to engage more deeply with the Chinese system, but how. This report analyses the policies, prospects and dilemmas for Chinese research and innovation over the next decade. It is designed to inform a more strategic approach to supporting China-UK collaboration