5,402 research outputs found

    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

    Fairness Testing: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Trends

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    Unfair behaviors of Machine Learning (ML) software have garnered increasing attention and concern among software engineers. To tackle this issue, extensive research has been dedicated to conducting fairness testing of ML software, and this paper offers a comprehensive survey of existing studies in this field. We collect 100 papers and organize them based on the testing workflow (i.e., how to test) and testing components (i.e., what to test). Furthermore, we analyze the research focus, trends, and promising directions in the realm of fairness testing. We also identify widely-adopted datasets and open-source tools for fairness testing

    Inclusive Intelligent Learning Management System Framework - Application of Data Science in Inclusive Education

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    Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceBeing a disabled student the author faced higher education with a handicap which as experience studying during COVID 19 confinement periods matched the findings in recent research about the importance of digital accessibility through more e-learning intensive academic experiences. Narrative and systematic literature reviews enabled providing context in World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, legal and standards framework and information technology and communication state-of-the art. Assessing Portuguese higher education institutions’ web sites alerted to the fact that only outlying institutions implemented near perfect, accessibility-wise, websites. Therefore a gap was identified in how accessible the Portuguese higher education websites are, the needs of all students, including those with disabilities, and even the accessibility minimum legal requirements for digital products and the services provided by public or publicly funded organizations. Having identified a problem in society and exploring the scientific base of knowledge for context and state of the art was a first stage in the Design Science Research methodology, to which followed development and validation cycles of an Inclusive Intelligent Learning Management System Framework. The framework blends various Data Science study fields contributions with accessibility guidelines compliant interface design and content upload accessibility compliance assessment. Validation was provided by a focus group whose inputs were considered for the version presented in this dissertation. Not being the purpose of the research to deliver a complete implementation of the framework and lacking consistent data to put all the modules interacting with each other, the most relevant modules were tested with open data as proof of concept. The rigor cycle of DSR started with the inclusion of the previous thesis on Atlântica University Institute Scientific Repository and is to be completed with the publication of this thesis and the already started PhD’s findings in relevant journals and conferences

    Reformulating aircraft routing algorithms to reduce fuel burn and thus CO2 emissions

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    During the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), in November 2021, the international aviation community agreed to advance actions to reduce CO2 emissions. Adopting more fuel efficient routes, now that full global satellite coverage is available, could achieve this quickly and economically. Here flights between New York and London, from 1st December, 2019 to 29th February, 2020 are considered. Trajectories through wind fields from a global atmospheric re-analysis dataset are found using optimal control theory. Initially, time minimal routes are obtained by applying Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle. Minimum time air distances are compared with actual Air Traffic Management tracks. Potential air distance savings range from 0.7 to 16.4%, depending on direction and track efficiency. To gauge the potential for longer duration time minimal round trips in the future, due to climate change, trajectories are considered for historic and future time periods, using an ensemble of climate models. Next, fixed-time, fuel-minimal routes are sought. Fuel consumption is modelled with a new physics-driven fuel burn function, which is aircraft model specific. Control variables of position-dependent aircraft headings and airspeeds or just headings are used. The importance of airspeed in finding trajectories is established, by comparing fuel burn found from a global search of optimised results for the discretised approximation of each formulation. Finally, dynamic programming is applied to find free-time, fuel-optimal routes. Results show that significant fuel reductions are possible, compared with estimates of fuel use from actual flights, without significant changes to flight duration. Fuel use for winter 2019–2020 could have been reduced by 4.6% eastbound and 3.9% westbound on flights between Heathrow and John F Kennedy Airports. This equates to a 16.6 million kg reduction in CO2 emissions. Thus large reductions in fuel consumption and emissions are possible immediately, without waiting decades for incremental improvements in fuel-efficiency through technological advances

    A Data-driven Approach to Large Knowledge Graph Matching

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    In the last decade, a remarkable number of open Knowledge Graphs (KGs) were developed, such as DBpedia, NELL, and YAGO. While some of such KGs are curated via crowdsourcing platforms, others are semi-automatically constructed. This has resulted in a significant degree of semantic heterogeneity and overlapping facts. KGs are highly complementary; thus, mapping them can benefit intelligent applications that require integrating different KGs such as recommendation systems, query answering, and semantic web navigation. Although the problem of ontology matching has been investigated and a significant number of systems have been developed, the challenges of mapping large-scale KGs remain significant. KG matching has been a topic of interest in the Semantic Web community since it has been introduced to the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) in 2018. Nonetheless, a major limitation of the current benchmarks is their lack of representation of real-world KGs. This work also highlights a number of limitations with current matching methods, such as: (i) they are highly dependent on string-based similarity measures, and (ii) they are primarily built to handle well-formed ontologies. These features make them unsuitable for large, (semi/fully) automatically constructed KGs with hundreds of classes and millions of instances. Another limitation of current work is the lack of benchmark datasets that represent the challenging task of matching real-world KGs. This work addresses the limitation of the current datasets by first introducing two gold standard datasets for matching the schema of large, automatically constructed, less-well-structured KGs based on common KGs such as NELL, DBpedia, and Wikidata. We believe that the datasets which we make public in this work make the largest domain-independent benchmarks for matching KG classes. As many state-of-the-art methods are not suitable for matching large-scale and cross-domain KGs that often suffer from highly imbalanced class distribution, recent studies have revisited instance-based matching techniques in addressing this task. This is because such large KGs often lack a well-defined structure and descriptive metadata about their classes, but contain numerous class instances. Therefore, inspired by the role of instances in KGs, we propose a hybrid matching approach. Our method composes an instance-based matcher that casts the schema-matching process as a text classification task by exploiting instances of KG classes, and a string-based matcher. Our method is domain-independent and is able to handle KG classes with imbalanced populations. Further, we show that incorporating an instance-based approach with the appropriate data balancing strategy results in significant results in matching large and common KG classes

    Mars delivery service - development of the electro-mechanical systems of the Sample Fetch Rover for the Mars Sample Return Campaign

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    This thesis describes the development of the Sample Fetch Rover (SFR), studied for Mars Sample Return (MSR), an international campaign carried out in cooperation between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The focus of this document is the design of the electro-mechanical systems of the rover. After placing this work into the general context of robotic planetary exploration and summarising the state of the art for what concerns Mars rovers, the architecture of the Mars Sample Return Campaign is presented. A complete overview of the current SFR architecture is provided, touching upon all the main subsystems of the spacecraft. For each area, it is discussed what are the design drivers, the chosen solutions and whether they use heritage technology (in particular from the ExoMars Rover) or new developments. This research focuses on two topics of particular interest, due to their relevance for the mission and the novelty of their design: locomotion and sample acquisition, which are discussed in depth. The early SFR locomotion concepts are summarised, covering the initial trade-offs and discarded designs for higher traverse performance. Once a consolidated architecture was reached, the locomotion subsystem was developed further, defining the details of the suspension, actuators, deployment mechanisms and wheels. This technology is presented here in detail, including some key analysis and test results that support the design and demonstrate how it responds to the mission requirements. Another major electro-mechanical system developed as part of this work is the one dedicated to sample tube acquisition. The concept of operations of this machinery was defined to be robust against the unknown conditions that characterise the mission. The design process led to a highly automated robotic system which is described here in its main components: vision system, robotic arm and tube storage

    Traffic Prediction using Artificial Intelligence: Review of Recent Advances and Emerging Opportunities

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    Traffic prediction plays a crucial role in alleviating traffic congestion which represents a critical problem globally, resulting in negative consequences such as lost hours of additional travel time and increased fuel consumption. Integrating emerging technologies into transportation systems provides opportunities for improving traffic prediction significantly and brings about new research problems. In order to lay the foundation for understanding the open research challenges in traffic prediction, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of traffic prediction methodologies. Specifically, we focus on the recent advances and emerging research opportunities in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based traffic prediction methods, due to their recent success and potential in traffic prediction, with an emphasis on multivariate traffic time series modeling. We first provide a list and explanation of the various data types and resources used in the literature. Next, the essential data preprocessing methods within the traffic prediction context are categorized, and the prediction methods and applications are subsequently summarized. Lastly, we present primary research challenges in traffic prediction and discuss some directions for future research.Comment: Published in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (TR_C), Volume 145, 202

    Using video games to study the acquisition and performance of psychomotor skills

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    Understanding how humans learn complex skills is a fundamental aim of cognitive science. Digital games offer promising opportunities to study cognitive factors associated with skill acquisition and performance, as they motivate longitudinal engagement and produce rich, multivariate data sets. By applying mutlivariate analysis techniques to data arising from gameplay, this thesis extended the literature on cognition as it pertains to psychomotor skill. We describe three studies that were conducted in this regard. In the first study, we analyzed the relationship between the temporal distribution of play instances and performance in a commercial digital game (League of Legends). Using clustering techniques and big data, we demonstrated that players who cram gameplay into short time frames ultimately perform worse than those who space the same number of games over longer periods. In the second study, we examined an experimental data set of participants who played Meta-T, a laboratory version of Tetris. Using Principal Components Analysis and regression techniques, we identified cognitive-behavioural markers of performance, such as action-latency and motor coordination. We also applied Hidden Markov models (HMM) to time series of these markers, showing that moment-to-moment dynamics in performance can be segmented into behavioural states related to latent psychological states. In the third study, we investigated the neural correlates of behavioural states during performance. Using simultaneous MEG and behavioural recordings of participants playing Tetris, we segmented time series datasets of neural activity based on time stamps of behavioural epochs derived from HMMs. We compared behavioural epochs based on neural markers, showing that cognitive states derived from multivariate behavioural data correlate with neural activity in the alpha band power. Taken together, this thesis advances our understanding of using digital game data to study cognition and learning. It demonstrates the feasibility of recording high-density neuroimaging data during complex behavioural tasks and obtaining reliable measures of internal neuronal states during complex behaviour

    Development of linguistic linked open data resources for collaborative data-intensive research in the language sciences

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    Making diverse data in linguistics and the language sciences open, distributed, and accessible: perspectives from language/language acquistiion researchers and technical LOD (linked open data) researchers. This volume examines the challenges inherent in making diverse data in linguistics and the language sciences open, distributed, integrated, and accessible, thus fostering wide data sharing and collaboration. It is unique in integrating the perspectives of language researchers and technical LOD (linked open data) researchers. Reporting on both active research needs in the field of language acquisition and technical advances in the development of data interoperability, the book demonstrates the advantages of an international infrastructure for scholarship in the field of language sciences. With contributions by researchers who produce complex data content and scholars involved in both the technology and the conceptual foundations of LLOD (linguistics linked open data), the book focuses on the area of language acquisition because it involves complex and diverse data sets, cross-linguistic analyses, and urgent collaborative research. The contributors discuss a variety of research methods, resources, and infrastructures. Contributors Isabelle Barrière, Nan Bernstein Ratner, Steven Bird, Maria Blume, Ted Caldwell, Christian Chiarcos, Cristina Dye, Suzanne Flynn, Claire Foley, Nancy Ide, Carissa Kang, D. Terence Langendoen, Barbara Lust, Brian MacWhinney, Jonathan Masci, Steven Moran, Antonio Pareja-Lora, Jim Reidy, Oya Y. Rieger, Gary F. Simons, Thorsten Trippel, Kara Warburton, Sue Ellen Wright, Claus Zin
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