Decision-theoretic control of EUVE telescope scheduling

This paper describes a decision theoretic scheduler (DTS) designed to employ state-of-the-art probabilistic inference technology to speed the search for efficient solutions to constraint-satisfaction problems. Our approach involves assessing the performance of heuristic control strategies that are normally hard-coded into scheduling systems and using probabilistic inference to aggregate this information in light of the features of a given problem. The Bayesian Problem-Solver (BPS) introduced a similar approach to solving single agent and adversarial graph search patterns yielding orders-of-magnitude improvement over traditional techniques. Initial efforts suggest that similar improvements will be realizable when applied to typical constraint-satisfaction scheduling problems

Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes

In 2010, tens of thousands of votes in New York did not count due to overvotes -- the invalid selection of more than one candidate. This report demonstrates how the lack of adequate overvote protections disproportionately affected the state's poorest communities, suggests commonsense reforms, and examines national implications

Meeting the Needs of the Workforce in a Shifting Regional Economy

The tri-state region (New York/New Jersey/Connecticut) supports a highly complex and diverse labor market that has been subject not only to the shocking events of September 11th, 2001, but also to broad demographic and economic trends that have shaped the structure of work and the makeup of the available workforce. This paper examines the shifts that occurred in the regional economy throughout the past decade and discusses the possible implications of these changes for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, educational institutions, and state and local governments

Caution Ahead: Overdue Investments in New York's Aging Infrastructure

While Superstorm Sandy focused much-needed attention on key pieces of New York City's infrastructure, the city faces a number of other infrastructure vulnerabilities that have little to do with storm-preparedness -- from aging water mains and deteriorating roads to crumbling public schools. If left unchecked, they could wreak havoc on the city's economy and quality of life

Characterization of whole-body vibration for monorail passenger ride comfort

Train travel has always been a major mode of public transport in developed countries. In the inner cities monorails are often used, which are operated at elevated rail or beam, the main advantage being traffic interactions can be minimized while maintaining its original landscape. Ride comfort is the basic requirement for every passenger in all kind of public transports. In monorail, vibration is considered as major factor of discomfort, it transmitted to human body, which contribute many health issues. The aim of this study was to evaluate the whole-body vibration transmission and the effects to the monorail passengers. There were total of twenty-four experiments conducted in a two-car train monorail on its complete line from Kuala Lumpur Sentral to Titiwangsa stations. Human vibration meter (HVM-100) with tri-axial accelerometer pad was used to measure the WBV of passengers and International Standards Organization (ISO) 2631-1: 1997 was used for analysis. The experimental results show that the daily vibration exposure 0.81 m/s2 was higher than the action value 0.5 m/s2 of the standard during peak operation and 0.82 m/s2 during off-peak operation. The health effect was measured 9.90 m/s1.75 during peak operation and 9.94 m/s1.75 during off-peak operation; both values are observed in moderate health effect zone as per standard (8.5 m/s1.75 to 17 m/s1.75). Moreover, the passenger ride comfort was measured, it was found to be fairly-uncomfortable at rear bogie and not-uncomfortable at center of car. The statistical analysis has proven the significance of orientation, location and operating hours by significant value p = 0.000 (i.e. p < α) with 29.5% of the variance has been accounted between groups. This provides justification to standardization of proper priority seating zone. The findings of this study can assist in the standard specification for seating design of monorail. The statistical analysis shows that all results are statistically significant for orientations, locations as well as operations

Small volume laboratory on a chip measurements incorporating the quartz crystal microbalance to measure the viscosity-density product of room temperature ionic liquids

A microfluidic glass chip system incorporating a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) to measure the square root of the viscosity-density product of room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) is presented. The QCM covers a central recess on a glass chip, with a seal formed by tightly clamping from above outside the sensing region. The change in resonant frequency of the QCM allows for the determination of the square root viscosity-density product of RTILs to a limit of ∼ 10 kg m−2 s−0.5. This method has reduced the sample size needed for characterization from 1.5 ml to only 30 μl and allows the measurement to be made in an enclosed system

Putting Queens in Carry Chains

This paper describes an FPGA implementation of a solution-counting solver for the N-Queens Puzzle. The proposed algorithmic mapping utilizes the fast carrychain logic found on modern FPGA architectures in order to achieve a regular and efficient design. From an initial full chessboard mapping, several optimization strategies are explored. Also, the infrastructure is described, which we have constructed for the computation of the currently unknown solution count of the 26- Queens Puzzle. Finally, we compare the performance of our used concrete FPGA device mappings also in contrast to general-purpose CPUs

Threads and Or-Parallelism Unified

One of the main advantages of Logic Programming (LP) is that it provides an excellent framework for the parallel execution of programs. In this work we investigate novel techniques to efficiently exploit parallelism from real-world applications in low cost multi-core architectures. To achieve these goals, we revive and redesign the YapOr system to exploit or-parallelism based on a multi-threaded implementation. Our new approach takes full advantage of the state-of-the-art fast and optimized YAP Prolog engine and shares the underlying execution environment, scheduler and most of the data structures used to support YapOr's model. Initial experiments with our new approach consistently achieve almost linear speedups for most of the applications, proving itself as a good alternative for exploiting implicit parallelism in the currently available low cost multi-core architectures.Comment: 17 pages, 21 figures, International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2010