The Evaluation of Route Guidance Systems

BACKGROUND We were commissioned by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory to: "collaborate with the German government and their representatives who are responsible for conducting the LISB trial in Berlin in order to produce an agreed methodology, which is acceptable in both Germany and the UK, for assessing the automatic route guidance systems which will be provided in Berlin and London." The brief suggested a number of aspects to be included, and required detailed proposals, timescales and costs for implementation in London. 1.1.2 The background to the brief lies in decisions to introduce pilot automatic route guidance systems in the two cities. The principles of the systems are similar, and have been described in detail elsewhere (Jeffery, 1987). In brief, they involve : (i) a central computer which retains information on a specified road network, which is updated using real time information from the equipment users; (ii) infra red beacons at selected junctions which transmit information to equipped vehicles and receive information from those vehicles; (iii) in-vehicle equipment which includes a dead-reckoning system for position finding, a device for requesting guidance and specifying the destination, a micro-computer which selects the optimal route, and a display which indicates when a turn is required on the main network, and the compass direction and distance to the final destination; iv) transmission from the equipped vehicles of origin, requested destination, links used since passing the last beacon and, for each link, the time of entry and departure and time spent delayed. It is this travel time information which is used to update the central computer's knowledge of the best routes. (Continues..

Process capability assessments in small development firms

[Abstract}: Assessment-based Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Bootstrap, and SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) are based on formal frameworks and promote the use of systematic processes and management practices for software development. These approaches identify best practices for the management of software development and when applied, enable organizations to understand, control and improve development processes. The purpose of a SPI assessment is to compare the current processes used in an organization with a list of recommended or ‘best’ practices. This research investigates the adoption of SPI initiatives by four small software development firms. These four firms participated in a process improvement program which was sponsored by Software Engineering Australia (SEA) (Queensland). The assessment method was based on SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) and included an initial assessment, recommendations, and a follow-up meeting. For each firm, before and after snapshots are provided of the capability as assessed on eight processes. The discussion which follows summarizes the improvements realized and considers the critical success factors relating to SPI adoption for small firms

Electricity from photovoltaic solar cells: Flat-Plate Solar Array Project final Report. Volume III: Silicon sheet: wafers and ribbons

The Flat-Plate Solar Array (FSA) Project, funded by the U.S. Government and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was formed in 1975 to develop the module/array technology needed to attain widespread terrestrial use of photovoltaics by 1985. To accomplish this, the FSA Project established and managed an Industry, University, and Federal Government Team to perform the needed research and development. The primary objective of the Silicon Sheet Task of the FSA Project was the development of one or more low-cost technologies for producing silicon sheet suitable for processing into cost-eompetitive solar cells. Silicon sheet refers to high-purity crystalline silicon of size and thickness for fabrication into solar cells. The Task effort began with state-of-the-art sheet technologies and then solicited and supported any new silicon sheet alternatives that had the potential to achieve the Project goals. A total of 48 contracts were awarded that covered work in the areas of ingot growth and casting, wafering, ribbon growth, other sheet technologies, and programs of supportive research. Periodic reviews of each sheet technology were held, assessing the technical progress and the long-range potential. Technologies that failed to achieve their promise, or seemed to have lower probabilities for success in comparison with others, were dropped. A series of workshops was initiated to assess the state of the art, to provide insights into problems remaining to be addressed, and to support technology transfer. The Task made and fostered significant improvements in silicon sheet including processing of both ingot and ribbon technologies. An additional important outcome was the vastly improved understanding of the characteristics associated with high-quality sheet, and the control of the parameters required for higher efficiency solar cells. Although significant sheet cost reductions were made, the technology advancements required to meet the Task cost goals were not achieved. This FSA Final Report (JPL Publication 86-31, 5101-289, DOE/JPL 1012-125, October 1986) is composed of eight volumes, consisting of an Executive Summary and seven technology reports: Volume I: Executive Summary. Volume II: Silicon Material. Volume III: Silicon Sheet: Wafers and Ribbons Volume IV: High-Efficiency Solar Celis. Volume V: Process Development. Volume VI: Engineering Sciences and Reliability. Volume VII: Module Encapsulation. Volume VIII: Project Analysis and Integration. Two supplemental reports included in the final report package are: FSA Project: 10 Years of Progress, JPL Document 400-279. 5101-279, October 1985. Summary of FSA Project Documentation: Abstracts of Published Documents, 1975 to 1986, JPL Publication 82-79 (Revision 1),5101-221, DOE/JPL-1 012-76, September 1986

Electricity from photovoltaic solar cells: Flat-Plate Solar Array Project final report. Volume VI: Engineering sciences and reliability

The Flat-Plate Solar Array (FSA) Project, funded by the U.S. Government and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was formed in 1975 to develop the module/array technology needed to attain widespread terrestrial use of photovoltaics by 1985. To accomplish this, the FSA Project established and managed an Industry, University, and Federal Government Team to perform the needed research and development. This volume of the series of final reports documenting the FSA Project deals with the Project's activities directed at developing the engineering technology base required to achieve modules that meet the functional, safety and reliability requirements of large-scale terrestrial photovoltaic systems applications. These activities included: (1) development of functional, safety, and reliability requirements for such applications; (2) development of the engineering analytical approaches, test techniques, and design solutions required to meet the requirements; (3) synthesis and procurement of candidate designs for test and evaluation; and (4) performance of extensive testing, evaluation, and failure analysis to define design shortfalls and, thus, areas requiring additional research and development. During the life of the FSA Project, these activities were known by and included a variety of evolving organizational titles: Design and Test, Large-Scale Procurements, Engineering, Engineering Sciences, Operations, Module Performance and Failure Analysis, and at the end of the Project, Reliability and Engineering Sciences. This volume provides both a summary of the approach and technical outcome of these activities and provides a complete Bibliography (Appendix A) of the published documentation covering the detailed accomplishments and technologies developed

Exploiting the potential of large databases of electronic health records for research using rapid search algorithms and an intuitive query interface.

Objective: UK primary care databases, which contain diagnostic, demographic and prescribing information for millions of patients geographically representative of the UK, represent a significant resource for health services and clinical research. They can be used to identify patients with a specified disease or condition (phenotyping) and to investigate patterns of diagnosis and symptoms. Currently, extracting such information manually is time-consuming and requires considerable expertise. In order to exploit more fully the potential of these large and complex databases, our interdisciplinary team developed generic methods allowing access to different types of user. Materials and methods: Using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink database, we have developed an online user-focused system (TrialViz), which enables users interactively to select suitable medical general practices based on two criteria: suitability of the patient base for the intended study (phenotyping) and measures of data quality. Results: An end-to-end system, underpinned by an innovative search algorithm, allows the user to extract information in near real-time via an intuitive query interface and to explore this information using interactive visualization tools. A usability evaluation of this system produced positive results. Discussion: We present the challenges and results in the development of TrialViz and our plans for its extension for wider applications of clinical research. Conclusions: Our fast search algorithms and simple query algorithms represent a significant advance for users of clinical research databases

High-Performance Integrated Window and Façade Solutions for California

The researchers developed a new generation of high-performance façade systems and supporting design and management tools to support industry in meeting California’s greenhouse gas reduction targets, reduce energy consumption, and enable an adaptable response to minimize real-time demands on the electricity grid. The project resulted in five outcomes: (1) The research team developed an R-5, 1-inch thick, triplepane, insulating glass unit with a novel low-conductance aluminum frame. This technology can help significantly reduce residential cooling and heating loads, particularly during the evening. (2) The team developed a prototype of a windowintegrated local ventilation and energy recovery device that provides clean, dry fresh air through the façade with minimal energy requirements. (3) A daylight-redirecting louver system was prototyped to redirect sunlight 15–40 feet from the window. Simulations estimated that lighting energy use could be reduced by 35–54 percent without glare. (4) A control system incorporating physics-based equations and a mathematical solver was prototyped and field tested to demonstrate feasibility. Simulations estimated that total electricity costs could be reduced by 9-28 percent on sunny summer days through adaptive control of operable shading and daylighting components and the thermostat compared to state-of-the-art automatic façade controls in commercial building perimeter zones. (5) Supporting models and tools needed by industry for technology R&D and market transformation activities were validated. Attaining California’s clean energy goals require making a fundamental shift from today’s ad-hoc assemblages of static components to turnkey, intelligent, responsive, integrated building façade systems. These systems offered significant reductions in energy use, peak demand, and operating cost in California

Web-Scale Training for Face Identification

Scaling machine learning methods to very large datasets has attracted considerable attention in recent years, thanks to easy access to ubiquitous sensing and data from the web. We study face recognition and show that three distinct properties have surprising effects on the transferability of deep convolutional networks (CNN): (1) The bottleneck of the network serves as an important transfer learning regularizer, and (2) in contrast to the common wisdom, performance saturation may exist in CNN's (as the number of training samples grows); we propose a solution for alleviating this by replacing the naive random subsampling of the training set with a bootstrapping process. Moreover, (3) we find a link between the representation norm and the ability to discriminate in a target domain, which sheds lights on how such networks represent faces. Based on these discoveries, we are able to improve face recognition accuracy on the widely used LFW benchmark, both in the verification (1:1) and identification (1:N) protocols, and directly compare, for the first time, with the state of the art Commercially-Off-The-Shelf system and show a sizable leap in performance