The role of intelligent systems in delivering the smart grid

The development of "smart" or "intelligent" energy networks has been proposed by both EPRI's IntelliGrid initiative and the European SmartGrids Technology Platform as a key step in meeting our future energy needs. A central challenge in delivering the energy networks of the future is the judicious selection and development of an appropriate set of technologies and techniques which will form "a toolbox of proven technical solutions". This paper considers functionality required to deliver key parts of the Smart Grid vision of future energy networks. The role of intelligent systems in providing these networks with the requisite decision-making functionality is discussed. In addition to that functionality, the paper considers the role of intelligent systems, in particular multi-agent systems, in providing flexible and extensible architectures for deploying intelligence within the Smart Grid. Beyond exploiting intelligent systems as architectural elements of the Smart Grid, with the purpose of meeting a set of engineering requirements, the role of intelligent systems as a tool for understanding what those requirements are in the first instance, is also briefly discussed

Playing Smart - Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games

Abstract: With this document we will present an overview of artificial intelligence in general and artificial intelligence in the context of its use in modern computer games in particular. To this end we will firstly provide an introduction to the terminology of artificial intelligence, followed by a brief history of this field of computer science and finally we will discuss the impact which this science has had on the development of computer games. This will be further illustrated by a number of case studies, looking at how artificially intelligent behaviour has been achieved in selected games

An open and extensible framework for spatially explicit land use change modelling in R: the lulccR package (0.1.0)

Land use change has important consequences for biodiversity and the sustainability of ecosystem services, as well as for global environmental change. Spatially explicit land use change models improve our understanding of the processes driving change and make predictions about the quantity and location of future and past change. Here we present the lulccR package, an object-oriented framework for land use change modelling written in the R programming language. The contribution of the work is to resolve the following limitations associated with the current land use change modelling paradigm: (1) the source code for model implementations is frequently unavailable, severely compromising the reproducibility of scientific results and making it impossible for members of the community to improve or adapt models for their own purposes; (2) ensemble experiments to capture model structural uncertainty are difficult because of fundamental differences between implementations of different models; (3) different aspects of the modelling procedure must be performed in different environments because existing applications usually only perform the spatial allocation of change. The package includes a stochastic ordered allocation procedure as well as an implementation of the widely used CLUE-S algorithm. We demonstrate its functionality by simulating land use change at the Plum Island Ecosystems site, using a dataset included with the package. It is envisaged that lulccR will enable future model development and comparison within an open environment

The impact of extensible business reporting language education and adoption on stock exchange development : a focus on Nigeria

This study aimed at investigating the impact of the possible learning and adoption of Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) in the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The data used for this study were gathered through the instruments of a questionnaire and secondary sources. One hundred and Fifty (150) copies of a questionnaire were administered, out of which one hundred and thirty-one (131) were collated for analysis. Kruskal-Wallis and descriptive statistical tools were used in testing these three hypotheses. Findings showed that environmental factors and problems in the Nigerian Stock exchange will affect the learning and implementation of XBRL in the Stock Exchange as well as the fact that certain infrastructure must be put in place before the implementation of XBRL. The study recommended that the Federal government should announce and compel the educational awareness and adoption of XBRL as a format for regulatory filing and financial reporting in the Nigerian Stock Exchange.peer-reviewe

Educating the educators: Incorporating bioinformatics into biological science education in Malaysia

Bioinformatics can be defined as a fusion of computational and biological sciences. The urgency to process and analyse the deluge of data created by proteomics and genomics studies has caused bioinformatics to gain prominence and importance. However, its multidisciplinary nature has created a unique demand for specialist trained in both biology and computing. In this review, we described the components that constitute the bioinformatics field and distinctive education criteria that are required to produce individuals with bioinformatics training. This paper will also provide an introduction and overview of bioinformatics in Malaysia. The existing bioinformatics scenario in Malaysia was surveyed to gauge its advancement and to plan for future bioinformatics education strategies. For comparison, we surveyed methods and strategies used in education by other countries so that lessons can be learnt to further improve the implementation of bioinformatics in Malaysia. It is believed that accurate and sufficient steerage from the academia and industry will enable Malaysia to produce quality bioinformaticians in the future

Opportunities for a Truffle-based Golo Interpreter

Golo is a simple dynamically-typed language for the Java Virtual Machine. Initially implemented as a ahead-of-time compiler to JVM bytecode, it leverages invokedy-namic and JSR 292 method handles to implement a reasonably efficient runtime. Truffle is emerging as a framework for building interpreters for JVM languages with self-specializing AST nodes. Combined with the Graal compiler, Truffle offers a simple path towards writing efficient interpreters while keeping the engineering efforts balanced. The Golo project is interested in experimenting with a Truffle interpreter in the future, as it would provides interesting comparison elements between invokedynamic versus Truffle for building a language runtime