Benchmark footbridge for vibration serviceability assessment under vertical component of pedestrian load

Vibration serviceability criteria are governing the design and determining the cost of modern, slender footbridges. Efficient and reliable evaluation of dynamic performance of these structures usually requires a detailed insight into the structural behaviour under human induced dynamic loading. Design procedures are becoming ever more sophisticated and versatile and for their successful use a thorough verification on a range of structures is required. The verification is currently hampered by a lack of experimental data that are presented in the form directly usable in the verification process

The Blame Game: Performance Analysis of Speaker Diarization System Components

In this paper we discuss the performance analysis of a speaker diarization system similar to the system that was submitted by ICSI at the NIST RT06s evaluation benchmark. The analysis that is based on a series of oracle experiments, provides a good understanding of the performance of each system component on a test set of twelve conference meetings used in previous NIST benchmarks. Our analysis shows that the speech activity detection component contributes most to the total diarization error rate (23%). The lack of ability to model verlapping speech is also a large source of errors (22%) followed by the component that creates the initial system models (15%)

Performance monitoring of MPC based on dynamic principal component analysis

A unified framework based on the dynamic principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed for performance monitoring of constrained multi-variable model predictive control (MPC) systems. In the proposed performance monitoring framework, the dynamic PCA based performance benchmark is adopted for performance assessment, while performance diagnosis is carried out using a unified weighted dynamic PCA similarity measure. Simulation results obtained from the case study of the Shell process demonstrate that the use of the dynamic PCA performance benchmark can detect the performance deterioration more quickly compared with the traditional PCA method, and the proposed unified weighted dynamic PCA similarity measure can correctly locate the root cause for poor performance of MPC controller

Colliders as a simultaneous probe of supersymmetric dark matter and Terascale cosmology

Terascale supersymmetry has the potential to provide a natural explanation of the dominant dark matter component of the standard lambda-CDM cosmology. However once we impose the constraints on minimal supersymmetry parameters from current particle physics data, a satisfactory dark matter abundance is no longer prima facie natural. This Neutralino Tuning Problem could be a hint of nonstandard cosmology during and/or after the Terascale era. To quantify this possibility, we introduce an alternative cosmological benchmark based upon a simple model of quintessential inflation. This benchmark has no free parameters, so for a given supersymmetry model it allows an unambiguous prediction of the dark matter relic density. As a example, we scan over the parameter space of the CMSSM, comparing the neutralino relic density predictions with the bounds from WMAP. We find that the WMAP--allowed regions of the CMSSM are an order of magnitude larger if we use the alternative cosmological benchmark, as opposed to lambda-CDM. Initial results from the CERN Large Hadron Collider will distinguish between the two allowed regions.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure