Simulation in the Cloud Using Handheld Devices

International audienceIn recent years, numerous applications have been deployed into mobile devices. However, until now, there have been no attempts to run simulations on handheld devices. We want investigate different architectures for running and managing simulations on handheld devices, and putting the simulation services in the Cloud. We propose a hybrid simulation and visualization approach, where a dedicated mobile application is running on the client side and the RISE simulation server is hosted in the Cloud. In particular, with our prototype, we explore the remote management of a simulation tool using a dedicated native application running on an Android Smartphone, and showing the evolution of a simulation model for a forest fire spread, mashing-up the generated graphics with online GIS services

Annual Brome (Bromus tectorum) Wildfire Fuel Breaks: Web-Enabled GIS Wildfire Model Decision Support System

Annual brome (Bromus tectorum), also known as Cheatgrass, is a non-native invasive plant that has degraded rangeland, and wildlife habitat, and has increased the frequency and severity of wildfires in the Western United States. An ArcGIS Server web-enabled GIS decision support system has been developed to empower landowners and land managers to identify critical areas for placing wildfire suppression annual brome fuel break on their land in order to protect their lives and property. The model identifies the critical predictive annual brome habitat and wildfire threat parameters, and uses web services to input the relevant GIS data that represent the model parameters. The GIS analysis is geoprocessed remotely and the potential fire break locations are distributed as a map web service accessible by a web browser with a graphical user interface, on a thinclient computer, along with technical information about the installation of wildfire fuel breaks

Space benefits: The secondary application of aerospace technology in other sectors of the economy

Benefit cases of aerospace technology utilization are presented for manufacturing, transportation, utilities, and health. General, organization, geographic, and field center indexes are included

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

geospatial analytics; social observatory; big earth data; open data; citizen science; open innovation; earth system science; crowdsourced geospatial data; citizen science; science in society; data scienc

ICSEA 2022: the seventeenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2022), held between October 16th and October 20th, 2022, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. Several tracks were proposed to treat the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learned. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. Other advanced aspects are related to on-time practical aspects, such as run-time vulnerability checking, rejuvenation process, updates partial or temporary feature deprecation, software deployment and configuration, and on-line software updates. These aspects trigger implications related to patenting, licensing, engineering education, new ways for software adoption and improvement, and ultimately, to software knowledge management. There are many advanced applications requiring robust, safe, and secure software: disaster recovery applications, vehicular systems, biomedical-related software, biometrics related software, mission critical software, E-health related software, crisis-situation software. These applications require appropriate software engineering techniques, metrics and formalisms, such as, software reuse, appropriate software quality metrics, composition and integration, consistency checking, model checking, provers and reasoning. The nature of research in software varies slightly with the specific discipline researchers work in, yet there is much common ground and room for a sharing of best practice, frameworks, tools, languages and methodologies. Despite the number of experts we have available, little work is done at the meta level, that is examining how we go about our research, and how this process can be improved. There are questions related to the choice of programming language, IDEs and documentation styles and standard. Reuse can be of great benefit to research projects yet reuse of prior research projects introduces special problems that need to be mitigated. The research environment is a mix of creativity and systematic approach which leads to a creative tension that needs to be managed or at least monitored. Much of the coding in any university is undertaken by research students or young researchers. Issues of skills training, development and quality control can have significant effects on an entire department. In an industrial research setting, the environment is not quite that of industry as a whole, nor does it follow the pattern set by the university. The unique approaches and issues of industrial research may hold lessons for researchers in other domains. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2022 technical program committee, as well as all the reviewers. The creation of such a high-quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors who dedicated much of their time and effort to contribute to ICSEA 2022. We truly believe that, thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consisted of top-quality contributions. We also thank the members of the ICSEA 2022 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics of this event. We hope that ICSEA 2022 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and for the promotion of progress in software engineering advances

Distribution and Dynamics of the Evergreen Understory Layer in Central Appalachian Highland Forests

Evergreen understory layer communities dominated by Rhododendron maximum L. and/or Kalmia latifolia L. may exert significant controls on regeneration of overstory trees, carbon sequestration, and nutrient retention in central Appalachian forests, but their distribution and ecological importance are poorly understood at the regional scale. The distribution, temporal dynamics, and biomass of the evergreen understory layer were examined in the Ridge and Valley and Allegheny Plateau physiographic provinces in the mid-Atlantic Highlands using plot data, remote sensing, dendrochronology, and modeling. First, leaf-off satellite remote sensing and topographic data were applied to map the spatial extent and distribution of R. maximum and K. latifolia with better than 80 percent accuracy. Second, plot data were used to determine the relevant environmental factors and species associations related to the distributions of K. latifolia and R. maximum and assess their influence on forest vertical structure. Cluster analysis and ordination revealed that topo-edaphic gradients and intensity of gypsy moth defoliation were associated with differences in the distribution of these two shrub species within and between the two study areas, and midstory volume was significantly lower where evergreen understory coverage was continuous. Third, variation in K. latifolia and R. maximum growth rates were examined using remote sensing change detection and dendrochronology, and trends were compared to the timing of climatic fluctuations and gypsy moth defoliation of canopy trees. Remote sensing showed that patterns of evergreen understory growth vigor correlated with both defoliation and topographically mediated drought stress. Dendrochronology revealed considerable within-site variability among individual shrubs. However, both releases and suppressions in growth were associated with the timing of gypsy moth defoliation for K. latifolia in both provinces and for R. maximum in the Allegheny Plateau. Finally, carbon sequestration and nutrient storage impacts of these species were estimated by modeling their current aboveground biomass and ecosystem storage influences on several test watersheds. The inclusion of K. latifolia and R. maximum in the ecosystem model NuCSS indicated increases of up to 4825 kg/ha of carbon and 224 kg/ha of nitrogen storage, including notable increases of carbon and nitrogen in the forest floor and soil pools

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement

Sensor Networks and Their Applications: Investigating the Role of Sensor Web Enablement

The Engineering Doctorate (EngD) was conducted in conjunction with BT Research on state-of-the-art Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) projects. The first area of work is a literature review of WSN project applications, some of which the author worked on as a BT Researcher based at the world renowned Adastral Park Research Labs in Suffolk (2004-09). WSN applications are examined within the context of Machine-to-Machine (M2M); Information Networking (IN); Internet/Web of Things (IoT/WoT); smart home and smart devices; BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN); Cloud Computing; and future trends. In addition, this thesis provides an insight into the capabilities of similar external WSN project applications. Under BT’s Sensor Virtualization project, the second area of work focuses on building a Generic Architecture for WSNs with reusable infrastructure and ‘infostructure’ by identifying and trialling suitable components, in order to realise actual business benefits for BT. The third area of work focuses on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and their Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative. The SWE framework was investigated to ascertain its potential as a component of the Generic Architecture. BT’s SAPHE project served as a use case. BT Research’s experiences of taking this traditional (vertical) stove-piped application and creating SWE compliant services are described. The author’s findings were originally presented in a series of publications and have been incorporated into this thesis along with supplementary WSN material from BT Research projects. SWE 2.0 specifications are outlined to highlight key improvements, since work began at BT with SWE 1.0. The fourth area of work focuses on Complex Event Processing (CEP) which was evaluated to ascertain its potential for aggregating and correlating the shared project sensor data (‘infostructure’) harvested and for enabling data fusion for WSNs in diverse domains. Finally, the conclusions and suggestions for further work are provided