49,539 research outputs found
Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD) Partnership’s work in Latin America
The Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD)
Partnership is a private-public collaboration led by USAID,
which aims to increase resilience to climate change in
developing countries through the development and
dissemination of climate services. The partnership
began with initial projects in three countries: Colombia,
Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. The International Center for
Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) was the lead organization for
the Colombian CSRD efforts – which then expanded to
encompass work in the whole Latin American region
Review of the Learning Alliance for Adaptation in Smallholder Agriculture
The Learning Alliance for Adaptation in Smallholder Agriculture is a knowledge platform which leverages the strengths, opportunities and diverse audiences of the International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). The objective of the Learning Alliance is to produce and disseminate evidence for informed policy and implementation of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) interventions by capturing, analyzing and communicating lessons emerging from the IFAD supported global Adaptation in Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). The Learning Alliance strives to enable agricultural development policy-makers and practitioners make science-based decisions in the context of climate change. The underlying assumption of the Learning Alliance is that the “provision of demand-driven research outputs to policy-makers and practitioners is a key mechanism for improving the effectiveness of adaptation actions among ultimate beneficiaries, in this case smallholder farmers”.
The review aims to identify areas for improvement to achieve the planned outcomes of the Learning Alliance more effectively. It provides recommendations to inform a further phase, based on the experience of those closely involved in the knowledge production and implementation of the Alliance
Shipbuilding 4.0 Index Approaching Supply Chain
The shipbuilding industry shows a special interest in adapting to the changes proposed by
the industry 4.0. This article bets on the development of an index that indicates the current situation
considering that supply chain is a key factor in any type of change, and at the same time it serves as a
control tool in the implementation of improvements. The proposed indices provide a first definition
of the paradigm or paradigms that best fit the supply chain in order to improve its sustainability and
a second definition, regarding the key enabling technologies for Industry 4.0. The values obtained
put shipbuilding on the road to industry 4.0 while suggesting categorized planning of technologies
Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction in WASH: Experience in DRR Mainstreaming in Nicaragua
Nicaragua is near the top of all international lists of countries with high disaster risk. Multiple global, national, and local factors augment the hazards faced by WASH services and increase their vulnerability. This publication discusses how disaster risk reduction (DRR) started in Nicaragua and the lessons learned from it
Significance Driven Hybrid 8T-6T SRAM for Energy-Efficient Synaptic Storage in Artificial Neural Networks
Multilayered artificial neural networks (ANN) have found widespread utility
in classification and recognition applications. The scale and complexity of
such networks together with the inadequacies of general purpose computing
platforms have led to a significant interest in the development of efficient
hardware implementations. In this work, we focus on designing energy efficient
on-chip storage for the synaptic weights. In order to minimize the power
consumption of typical digital CMOS implementations of such large-scale
networks, the digital neurons could be operated reliably at scaled voltages by
reducing the clock frequency. On the contrary, the on-chip synaptic storage
designed using a conventional 6T SRAM is susceptible to bitcell failures at
reduced voltages. However, the intrinsic error resiliency of NNs to small
synaptic weight perturbations enables us to scale the operating voltage of the
6TSRAM. Our analysis on a widely used digit recognition dataset indicates that
the voltage can be scaled by 200mV from the nominal operating voltage (950mV)
for practically no loss (less than 0.5%) in accuracy (22nm predictive
technology). Scaling beyond that causes substantial performance degradation
owing to increased probability of failures in the MSBs of the synaptic weights.
We, therefore propose a significance driven hybrid 8T-6T SRAM, wherein the
sensitive MSBs are stored in 8T bitcells that are robust at scaled voltages due
to decoupled read and write paths. In an effort to further minimize the area
penalty, we present a synaptic-sensitivity driven hybrid memory architecture
consisting of multiple 8T-6T SRAM banks. Our circuit to system-level simulation
framework shows that the proposed synaptic-sensitivity driven architecture
provides a 30.91% reduction in the memory access power with a 10.41% area
overhead, for less than 1% loss in the classification accuracy.Comment: Accepted in Design, Automation and Test in Europe 2016 conference
(DATE-2016
Building Information Modeling as Tool for Enhancing Disaster Resilience of the Construction Industry
As frequencies of the disasters are increasing, new technologies can be used to enhance
disaster resilience performance of the construction industry. This paper investigates
the usage of BIM (Building Information Modeling) in enhancing disaster resilience of
the construction industry and in the establishment of the resilient built environment.
In-depth literature review findings reveal BIM’s contribution to the disaster resilience in the
pre-disaster and post-disaster phases especially through influencing the performance of
the supply chain, construction process, and rescue operations. This paper emphasises
the need for BIM’s integration to the education and training curriculums of the built
environment professionals. Policy makers, construction professionals, professional
bodies, academics can benefit from this research
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