Some Requests for Machine Learning Research from the East African Tech Scene

Based on 46 in-depth interviews with scientists, engineers, and CEOs, this document presents a list of concrete machine research problems, progress on which would directly benefit tech ventures in East Africa.Comment: Presented at NIPS 2018 Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing Worl

Solar energy bibliography

Listings are provided of technical briefs, reports, and papers pertaining to research being performed in the field of solar energy

Transparent Location Fingerprinting for Wireless Services

Detecting the user location is crucial in a wireless environment, not only for the choice of first-hop communication partners, but also for many auxiliary purposes: Quality of Service (availability of information in the right place for reduced congestion/delay, establishment of the optimal path), energy consumption, automated insertion of location-dependent info into a web query issued by a user (for example a tourist asking informations about a monument or a restaurant, a fireman approaching a disaster area). The technique we propose in our investigation tries to meet two main goals: transparency to the network and independence from the environment. A user entering an environment (for instance a wireless-networked building) shall be able to use his own portable equipment to build a personal map of the environment without the system even noticing it. Preliminary tests allow us to detect position on a map with an average uncertainty of two meters when using information gathered from three IEEE802.11 access points in an indoor environment composed of many rooms on a 625sqm area. Performance is expected to improve when more access points will be exploited in the test area. Implementation of the same techniques on Bluetooth are also being studied

Warrantless Government Drone Surveillance: A Challenge to the Fourth Amendment, 30 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 155 (2013)

The Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 aims to integrate drones into the United States national airspace by 2015. While the thought of prevalent private and public daily drone use might seem implausible now, the combination of this new legislation and the increasing availability of inexpensive, technologically advanced small drones will make it a reality. From detectaphones to pen registers and most recently, the GPS, the Supreme Court has faced a plethora of unreasonable search challenges to the warrantless use of such sense augmentation devices by law enforcement to collect information. Acting as the privacy safeguard of the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment has been invoked to challenge the warrantless governmental use of this ever-evolving timeline of devices. The gauge of Fourth Amendment protection has been society’s view of what is or is not a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, with the voluntary in-crease in the dissemination of personal, private information society’s objective view of reasonable expectations of privacy has become blurred. With the ability to capture high-resolution images and video, sustain mass surveillance, and long-term data retention, the drone presents one of the greatest challenges to society’s privacy expectations under the Fourth Amendment. As the drone is poised to become the newest in a long line of surveillance tools available to law enforcement, an important inquiry is whether such use will require a warrant. This Comment will analyze United States Supreme Court case law concerning various surveillance devices challenged under the Fourth Amendment and argue for several approaches to be taken to ensure the protection of privacy rights with-out needlessly hindering government use of a potentially important investigative device

Semantic enrichment of city information models with LiDAR-based rooftop albedo

In the era of smart city, semantically rich city information models (CIMs) are demanded as a critical information hub. Roof albedo, a semantic property measures how much solar radiation is reflected, is vital to various urban sustainability topics, including heat island, local climate, green roof, and urban morphology. This paper presents an approach that enriches LiDAR-based albedo to rooftop models for CIM. First, we apply Chen et al. (2018)’s method to the reconstruction of the geometries of rooftop elements. Then, albedos of roofs and rooftop elements are estimated from the mean reflectance in LiDAR data. A pilot study was conducted in an urban area in Hong Kong. The results showed that the building models created by the presented approach were satisfactory in terms of rooftop elements and roof albedos. The results from the present approach can provide sustainability study the details of 3D geometries and albedos in an urban area

Location-based technologies for learning

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring location based technologies and their potential for educatio

Development of practical vocational training class making use of virtual reality-based simulation system and augmented reality technologies

Virtual reality (VR) refers to the technologies creating a virtual environment to provide users a sensory simulation of the environment being presented. In Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (IVE), we are in the process of developing a VR-based simulation system having four screens surrounding users to simulate an immersive environment. This application is commonly known as the cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). The objective of our VR-based simulation system project is to apply the virtual reality and the augmented reality (AR) technologies for practical training in vocational education and training (VET). Our system is used for various training programs in the engineering areas. These include simulation of any workspaces for operations and maintenance training in electrical and mechanical services. Workspace training is important and beneficial to VET students in addition to practical training in school settings. Meanwhile, some workspaces are full of danger and severe casualty can be resulted if inappropriate operations are performed. Our VRbased simulation system manages to provide a solution to complement the shortfalls of workplace training and ensure that students can acquire a range of skills including safety operations under various environments. In this paper, we introduce our design of a class making use of the CAVE system and augmented reality technology. The class aims at providing training for VET students to perform inspection and maintenance procedures in a virtual engine plant room. The class was found to be educational and managed to promote the skill development among students