5,066 research outputs found

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Avaliação de Políticas Sustentáveis

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    Sustainability policy evaluation and assessment seeks to answer the key question, sustainability of what and whom? Consequently, sustainability issues are multidimensional in nature and feature a high degree of conflict, uncertainty and complexity. Social multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE) has been explicitly designed for public policies; it builds on formal modelling techniques whose main achievement is the fact that the use of different evaluation criteria translates directly into plurality of values and dimensions underpinning a policy process. SMCE aims at being inter/multi-disciplinary (with respect to the technical team), participatory (with respect to the community) and transparent. SMCE can help deal with three different types of sustainability-related policy issues: 1) epistemological uncertainty (human representation of a given policy problem necessarily reflects perceptions, values and interests of those structuring the problem); 2) complexity (the existence of different levels and scales at which a hierarchical system can be analyzed implies the unavoidable existence of non-equivalent descriptions of it both in space and time); and 3) mathematical manipulation rules of relevant information (compensability versus non-compensability, preference modelling of intensities of preference, mixed information on criterion scores, weights as trade-offs versus weights as importance coefficients, choice of a proper ranking algorithm). This paper focuses on the these three issues and provides an overview of the SMCE approaches to them

    Technology for Low Resolution Space Based RSO Detection and Characterisation

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    Space Situational Awareness (SSA) refers to all activities to detect, identify and track objects in Earth orbit. SSA is critical to all current and future space activities and protect space assets by providing access control, conjunction warnings, and monitoring status of active satellites. Currently SSA methods and infrastructure are not sufficient to account for the proliferations of space debris. In response to the need for better SSA there has been many different areas of research looking to improve SSA most of the requiring dedicated ground or space-based infrastructure. In this thesis, a novel approach for the characterisation of RSO’s (Resident Space Objects) from passive low-resolution space-based sensors is presented with all the background work performed to enable this novel method. Low resolution space-based sensors are common on current satellites, with many of these sensors being in space using them passively to detect RSO’s can greatly augment SSA with out expensive infrastructure or long lead times. One of the largest hurtles to overcome with research in the area has to do with the lack of publicly available labelled data to test and confirm results with. To overcome this hurtle a simulation software, ORBITALS, was created. To verify and validate the ORBITALS simulator it was compared with the Fast Auroral Imager images, which is one of the only publicly available low-resolution space-based images found with auxiliary data. During the development of the ORBITALS simulator it was found that the generation of these simulated images are computationally intensive when propagating the entire space catalog. To overcome this an upgrade of the currently used propagation method, Specialised General Perturbation Method 4th order (SGP4), was performed to allow the algorithm to run in parallel reducing the computational time required to propagate entire catalogs of RSO’s. From the results it was found that the standard facet model with a particle swarm optimisation performed the best estimating an RSO’s attitude with a 0.66 degree RMSE accuracy across a sequence, and ~1% MAPE accuracy for the optical properties. This accomplished this thesis goal of demonstrating the feasibility of low-resolution passive RSO characterisation from space-based platforms in a simulated environment

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    k-Means

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    Biochemical sensing based on metal-organic architectures

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    This research work is about the use of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) as a platform for biochemical sensing purposes. Different metal–organic architectures were used and individual approaches were pursued, such as the synthesis of electrically conductive hybrid MOF structures as chemiresistive sensing material and the integration of MOF particles into a polymer membrane to explore their potential for sweat biomarker detection using Raman spectroscopy. The focus in each project was on the application of our MOF as sensor material and the evaluation of the signal response upon exposure to relevant analytes. The achievements presented in this work emphasize the great potential that metal–organic architectures have as active material for the sensing of biochemical analytes

    Trustworthy Federated Learning: A Survey

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    Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a significant advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling collaborative model training across distributed devices while maintaining data privacy. As the importance of FL increases, addressing trustworthiness issues in its various aspects becomes crucial. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of the current state of Trustworthy FL, exploring existing solutions and well-defined pillars relevant to Trustworthy . Despite the growth in literature on trustworthy centralized Machine Learning (ML)/Deep Learning (DL), further efforts are necessary to identify trustworthiness pillars and evaluation metrics specific to FL models, as well as to develop solutions for computing trustworthiness levels. We propose a taxonomy that encompasses three main pillars: Interpretability, Fairness, and Security & Privacy. Each pillar represents a dimension of trust, further broken down into different notions. Our survey covers trustworthiness challenges at every level in FL settings. We present a comprehensive architecture of Trustworthy FL, addressing the fundamental principles underlying the concept, and offer an in-depth analysis of trust assessment mechanisms. In conclusion, we identify key research challenges related to every aspect of Trustworthy FL and suggest future research directions. This comprehensive survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on the development and implementation of Trustworthy FL systems, contributing to a more secure and reliable AI landscape.Comment: 45 Pages, 8 Figures, 9 Table

    1-D broadside-radiating leaky-wave antenna based on a numerically synthesized impedance surface

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    A newly-developed deterministic numerical technique for the automated design of metasurface antennas is applied here for the first time to the design of a 1-D printed Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA) for broadside radiation. The surface impedance synthesis process does not require any a priori knowledge on the impedance pattern, and starts from a mask constraint on the desired far-field and practical bounds on the unit cell impedance values. The designed reactance surface for broadside radiation exhibits a non conventional patterning; this highlights the merit of using an automated design process for a design well known to be challenging for analytical methods. The antenna is physically implemented with an array of metal strips with varying gap widths and simulation results show very good agreement with the predicted performance

    METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION

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    We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively. Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness, speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city
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