Medium Alt-Az Telescope Control System Standardization. A case Study: The TT1 Control System

The TT1 (Toppo Telescope #1) is a 1.54 m Alt-Az telescope designed and built by the Technology Working Group (TWG) of the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte (OAC), Naples Italy. The standardization process is of course one of the fundamental requirements for telescope control system design and development, well considered in the TT1 design. In this paper the approach used to identify a control system applicable to medium-size Alt-Az telescope is presented

The Evolution of Technology in Call Centers

Historical research was conducted through literature. The report traces the evolution of technology in call centers (CCs) from their early inception to 2018. CCs are integrated into many facets of multidisciplinary areas of business, industry, and public and private institutions of higher education. Three research questions were addressed: What technologies enabled the start of CCs? How did the communications between customers and CSRs take place? What was the content of the earlier communications? How did services and communications evolve as technology matured? What are the current state-of-the-art technologies that exist in CCs? Which industries appear to have the best solutions? What are these solutions? Photograph Analysis Worksheets and Written Document Analysis Worksheets from the National Archives and Records Administration were used to analyze primary source materials. Also, used were Primary Source Analysis Tools from the Library of Congress. The final report offers a comprehensive history of the technology evolution within the industry. Included are a discussion of state-of-the-art technologies, the range of their applications and suggestions for staff training

Effective interprocess communication (IPC) in a real-time transputer network

The thesis describes the design and implementation of an interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism within a real-time distributed operating system kernel (RT-DOS) which is designed for a transputer-based network. The requirements of real-time operating systems are examined and existing design and implementation strategies are described. Particular attention is paid to one of the object-oriented techniques although it is concluded that these techniques are not feasible for the chosen implementation platform. Studies of a number of existing operating systems are reported. The choices for various aspects of operating system design and their influence on the IPC mechanism to be used are elucidated. The actual design choices are related to the real-time requirements and the implementation that has been adopted is described. [Continues.

Cyber-Physical Embedded Systems with Transient Supervisory Command and Control: A Framework for Validating Safety Response in Automated Collision Avoidance Systems

The ability to design and engineer complex and dynamical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) requires a systematic view that requires a definition of level of automation intent for the system. Since CPS covers a diverse range of systemized implementations of smart and intelligent technologies networked within a system of systems (SoS), the terms “smart” and “intelligent” is frequently used in describing systems that perform complex operations with a reduced need of a human-agent. The difference between this research and most papers in publication on CPS is that most other research focuses on the performance of the CPS rather than on the correctness of its design. However, by using both human and machine agency at different levels of automation, or autonomy, the levels of automation have profound implications and affects to the reliability and safety of the CPS. The human-agent and the machine-agent are in a tidal lock of decision-making using both feedforward and feedback information flows in similar processes, where a transient shift within the level of automation when the CPS is operating can have undesired consequences. As CPS systems become more common, and higher levels of autonomy are embedded within them, the relationship between human-agent and machine-agent also becomes more complex, and the testing methodologies for verification and validation of performance and correctness also become more complex and less clear. A framework then is developed to help the practitioner to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of CPS designs and provides guidance to test engineering design of soft computational systems using combinations of modeling, simulation, and prototyping

The evolution of retail banking services in United Kingdom: a retrospective analysis

The purpose of this paper is to assess the sequence of technological changes occurred in the retail banking sector of the United Kingdom against the emergence of customer services by developing an evolutionary argument. The historical paradigm of Information Technology provides useful insights into the ‘learning opportunities’ that opened the way to endogenous changes in the banking activity such as the reconfiguration of its organizational structure and the diversification of the product line. The central idea of this paper is that innovation never occurs without simultaneous structural change. Thus, a defining property of the banking activity is the diachronic adaptation of formal and informal practices to an evolving technological dimension reflecting the extent to which the diffusion of innovation (re)generates variety of micro level processes and induces industry evolution.Information Technology; Retail Banking; History of Technology; Innovation Systems.

Implementation of a HTTP Web-Server Using VxWorks

In this modern age, embedded systems are one of the most vital needs in each and every field of science and commerce. Starting from the space crafts to the simple mobile phones, embedded systems find their use everywhere. But, unlike the general purpose devices like personal computers, laptops, the embedded systems have very limited resources available with them. For example they have limited primary memory, less computational power and designed to perform a specific function. As these embedded system work in mission critical situations, a proper communication system should be present that allows the user to communicate with the system. The user should be able to download necessary readings, upload required data in to the remotely located embedded system. Further the communication platform should be simple and similar to the internet technology, so that it would be easier to implement it. The main aim of this project to develop such technology. To use a simple and most popular protocol like HTTP and create a web server which could be run in the embedded system. The requirement of the web server is also limited. i.e. it requires an IPv4 cross-platform network library, a C++ compiler, support for connection-oriented BSD sockets and an internet connection. Implementing the server using HTTP protocol would allow the web server to be accessed from many device like palmtop, laptop, personal computers and even mobile phones. This projects basically deals with the development of an HTTP webserver using Vxworks and WIndriver workbench 3.3. The server is supported in most of environment like the windows, Linux and embedded systems. The server supports the HTTP GET, POST and HEAD requests and also provides the HTTP status code just like a simple HTTP web server. The server has been accessed using the web browsers and the necessary outputs were recorded. The windows telnet client was also used to test the server’s ability in processing the HTTP GET, HEAD requests. The status codes obtained were also recorded

Acoustic Features of Different Types of Laughter in North Sami Conversational Speech

Peer reviewe

Cognitive architecture of multimodal multidimensional dialogue management

Numerous studies show that participants of real-life dialogues happen to get involved in rather dynamic non-sequential interactions. This challenges the dialogue system designs based on a reactive interlocutor paradigm and calls for dialog systems that can be characterised as a proactive learner, accomplished multitasking planner and adaptive decision maker. Addressing this call, the thesis brings innovative integration of cognitive models into the human-computer dialogue systems. This work utilises recent advances in Instance-Based Learning of Theory of Mind skills and the established Cognitive Task Analysis and ACT-R models. Cognitive Task Agents, producing detailed simulation of human learning, prediction, adaption and decision making, are integrated in the multi-agent Dialogue Man-ager. The manager operates on the multidimensional information state enriched with representations based on domain- and modality-specific semantics and performs context-driven dialogue acts interpretation and generation. The flexible technical framework for modular distributed dialogue system integration is designed and tested. The implemented multitasking Interactive Cognitive Tutor is evaluated as showing human-like proactive and adaptive behaviour in setting goals, choosing appropriate strategies and monitoring processes across contexts, and encouraging the user exhibit similar metacognitive competences