IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF HYBRID MAIN MEMORY THROUGH SYSTEM AWARE MANAGEMENT OF HETEROGENEOUS RESOURCES

Modern computer systems feature memory hierarchies which typically include DRAM as the main memory and HDD as the secondary storage. DRAM and HDD have been extensively used for the past several decades because of their high performance and low cost per bit at their level of hierarchy. Unfortunately, DRAM is facing serious scaling and power consumption problems, while HDD has suffered from stagnant performance improvement and poor energy efficiency. After all, computer system architects have an implicit consensus that there is no hope to improve future system’s performance and power consumption unless something fundamentally changes. To address the looming problems with DRAM and HDD, emerging Non-Volatile RAMs (NVRAMs) such as Phase Change Memory (PCM) or Spin-Transfer-Toque Magnetoresistive RAM (STT-MRAM) have been actively explored as new media of future memory hierarchy. However, since these NVRAMs have quite different characteristics from DRAM and HDD, integrating NVRAMs into conventional memory hierarchy requires significant architectural re-considerations and changes, imposing additional and complicated design trade-offs on the memory hierarchy design. This work assumes a future system in which both main memory and secondary storage include NVRAMs and are placed on the same memory bus. In this system organization, this dissertation work has addressed a problem facing the efficient exploitation of NVRAMs and DRAM integrated into a future platform’s memory hierarchy. Especially, this dissertation has investigated the system performance and lifetime improvement endowed by a novel system architecture called Memorage which co-manages all available physical NVRAM resources for main memory and storage at a system-level. Also, the work has studied the impact of a model-guided, hardware-driven page swap in a hybrid main memory on the application performance. Together, the two ideas enable a future system to ameliorate high system performance degradation under heavy memory pressure and to avoid an inefficient use of DRAM capacity due to injudicious page swap decisions. In summary, this research has not only demonstrated how emerging NVRAMs can be effectively employed and integrated in order to enhance the performance and endurance of a future system, but also helped system architects understand important design trade-offs for emerging NVRAMs based memory and storage systems

Emerging Technologies

This monograph investigates a multitude of emerging technologies including 3D printing, 5G, blockchain, and many more to assess their potential for use to further humanity’s shared goal of sustainable development. Through case studies detailing how these technologies are already being used at companies worldwide, author Sinan Küfeoğlu explores how emerging technologies can be used to enhance progress toward each of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and to guarantee economic growth even in the face of challenges such as climate change. To assemble this book, the author explored the business models of 650 companies in order to demonstrate how innovations can be converted into value to support sustainable development. To ensure practical application, only technologies currently on the market and in use actual companies were investigated. This volume will be of great use to academics, policymakers, innovators at the forefront of green business, and anyone else who is interested in novel and innovative business models and how they could help to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. This is an open access book

Behavioural adaptation to in-vehicle navigation systems

This PhD investigates driver behavioural adaptation to in-vehicle navigation systems (IVNS). Behavioural adaptation is receiving an increasing amount of research attention in traffic psychology, but few studies have directly considered the concept in relation to IVNS. The thesis aims were addressed using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Using two online surveys, over 1300 drivers (including over 1000 IVNS users) were sampled, to identify a range of positive, neutral and negative aspects of end-user behavioural adaptation to IVNS in terms of both safety and navigational efficiency. The first survey (N=450) aimed at drivers in general, showed that IVNS users believe they commit some common driving errors (e.g. misreading signs when leaving a roundabout) significantly less frequently than ordinary drivers who do not use these systems, but that they also feel they drive without fully attending to the road ahead significantly more frequently. The second survey (N=872) was aimed at IVNS users only, and further explored distracted driving. This survey found that the majority of IVNS users have interacted with their system while driving (e.g. to enter a destination), and that some do so frequently. It also showed that system reliability is a key issue affecting most current IVNS users, revealing that some drivers have followed inaccurate as well as illegal and potentially dangerous, system-generated route guidance information in a range of different contexts. A longitudinal diary study (N=20) then collected rich qualitative data from a sample of worker drivers who regularly used their IVNS in unfamiliar areas. The data collected illustrated the diverse contexts in which drivers experience aspects of behavioural adaptation to IVNS identified in the surveys. Both the IVNS user-survey and diary study also identified key demographic individual difference variables (most notably age and computing skill) that were associated with the extent to which driver’s experienced different manifestations of behavioural adaptation to IVNS. Moreover, other individual difference variables (e.g. complacency potential, system-trust, confidence) were found to be associated with more specific behavioural adaptations. Two simulator studies investigated system interaction while driving. The first (N=24) demonstrated the poor degree of correspondence between drivers’ perceptions of driving performance when entering destinations while driving (relative to normal driving) and objective performance differences between these conditions. The second simulator study (N=24) showed that safety and training based interventions designed to reduce the extent to which drivers use IVNS while driving or to improve their performance if they do had only a modest effect on dependent measures. This thesis represents the first attempt in the literature to bring together research from diverse areas of human factors and traffic psychology to consider behavioural adaptation to in-vehicle navigation systems. By associating a range of these issues with behavioural adaptation to IVNS, it has indirectly increased the scope of several salient, previous research findings. Moreover, by investigating many of these issues in depth, using both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches, it has set the foundation for future work. Such work should aim to explore many of the issues raised, and develop effective remediating or mitigating intervention strategies for negative behavioural adaptations that could adversely affect driving safety, as well as to encourage and support those which may be considered more positive

A framework for overall sustainability assessment of local small-scale energy production - demonstration of an approach

201

New and enhanced policy measures for the sustainable use of natural resources in agriculture and forestry

201

Sharing our digital aura through social and physical proximity

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-160).People are quite good at establishing a social style and using it in different communications contexts, but they do less well when the communication is mediated by computer networks. It is hard to control what information is revealed and how one's digital persona will be presented or interpreted. In this thesis, we ameliorate this problem by creating a "Virtual Private Milieu", a "VPM", that allows networked devices to act on our behalf and project a "digital aura" to other people and devices around us in a manner analogous to the way humans naturally interact with one another. The dynamic aggregation of the different auras and facets that the devices expose to one another creates social spheres of interaction between sets of active devices, and consequently between people. We focus on the subset of networking that deals with proximate communication, which we dub Face-to-Face Networking (FtFN). Network interaction in this space is often analogous to human face-to-face interaction, and increasingly, our devices are being used in local situations. We describe a VPM framework, key features of which include the incorporation of trust and context parameters into the discovery and communication process, incorporation of multiple contextunique identities, and also the support for multiple degrees of security and privacy. We also present the "Social Dashboard", a readily usable control for one's aura. Finally, we review "Comm.unity", a software package that allows developers and researchers easy implementation and deployment of local and distant social applications, and present two applications developed over this platform.Nadav Aharony.S.M

SUSTAINABLE FUTURES IN A CHANGING CLIMATE : Proceedings of the Conference “Sustainable Futures in a Changing Climate”, 11–12 June 2014, Helsinki, Finland

How does climate change influence our understanding of the future? How can we contribute to creating desirable but possible futures in the era of climate change? The Finland Futures Research Centre’s 16th Annual International Conference ‘Sustainable Futures in a Changing Climate’ focused on presenting current future-oriented research on different aspects of climate change, and thus, the conference contributed to the global field of knowledge sharing concerning climate change. This conference gathered together 140 participants from 21 different countries. During the two days, altogether 67 presentations were held in 11 thematic working groups dealing with various topics. This conference proceedings collects some of the full conference papers presented in the thematic working groups. The articles in this publication are divided to chapters according to the themes of the working groups. Each article in this conference proceedings has gone through a peer review process. We thank all the authors of the articles and the anonymous referees for their valuable contribution to this publication

The Listening Practices Of Secondary School Students Whilst They Are Studying

This thesis discusses why and how fifteen to twenty-one year old students in formal education listen to music or religious scriptures during study. The fieldwork for this research was conducted in two educational institutes in London: a large further education college (FE) and a small fee-paying academy of Islamic faith. My study combines sociological and ethnographic approaches, most notably from sociology of education and ethnomusicology. The theoretical framework used merges Bourdieusian critical theory and Wengerian social theory to analyse student learning experiences, listening practices and personal contexts within a critical sociocultural frame. This involved analysing how students enact their agency within the parameters of educational, social, economic and cultural structures. A mixed-method ethnographic methodological approach was used, which consisted of short-term classroom observations, in-depth narrative interviews, and a mixed survey using both open- and closed-ended questions. Data collection resulted in a total of 30 surveys returned, 7 classroom observations, 5 teacher interviews, and 10 student interview transcripts from 20 student interviewees. Interviews were conducted face-to-face, at institutes and one-to-one or in groups. The data collected was analysed using narrative inquiry and thematic analysis. Findings showed that the practice of listening during study is connected to a student’s learning and personal contexts. In addition to this, students were found to use different listening strategies to manage different economic, social and cultural conditions, and to use their recordings to enact accommodative agency within each learning context. They adopted this strategy to fit in, and conform, rather than resist authority and rebel against commonly accepted institutional and societal educational aims and objectives

Status, revisionism, and great power strategy : US-China positional competition and the struggle for leadership in Asia-Pacific

The dissertation addresses the core IR problem of revisionism and relates it to both the declining superpower and the rising great power, both the United States and China. The dissertation also offers a novel conceptualization of international order in terms of which revisionism is understood. The theoretical innovation of the dissertation modifies established structural realist theories and shifts the explanatory focus from security to status. Since status, defined as social position, is composed of both power and prestige, both change in the balance of power and the balance of prestige explain revisionism, which then cause dissatisfaction in the form of status anxiety in the dominant state. This leads the dominant power to revise the international order to maintain its leading status. It then attempts to block the ascendance of the rising challenger, which frustrates the status aspirations of the rising power who responds by carving out an alternative international order that can satisfy its desire for status. The theory explains when and why revisionism relates to both the status-maintenance strategy of the declining dominant power and the status-enhancement strategy of the rising great power. The declining superpower revises to maintain, whereas the rising great power revises to enhance. The dissertation applies this insight to the positional competition for leadership in the Asia-Pacific and the struggle between alternative regional orders. The US pivot to Asia under the Obama administration exemplifies the revisionist status-maintenance strategy. China, after Xi Jinping’s assumption of power, then begins to carve out an alternative regional order. On the US side, the dissertation scrutinizes the cases of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and America’s Principled Security Network. On the Chinese side, the dissertation scrutinizes the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and China’s project for an Asian Security Order