6,039 research outputs found

    Dataflow Programming and Acceleration of Computationally-Intensive Algorithms

    Get PDF
    The volume of unstructured textual information continues to grow due to recent technological advancements. This resulted in an exponential growth of information generated in various formats, including blogs, posts, social networking, and enterprise documents. Numerous Enterprise Architecture (EA) documents are also created daily, such as reports, contracts, agreements, frameworks, architecture requirements, designs, and operational guides. The processing and computation of this massive amount of unstructured information necessitate substantial computing capabilities and the implementation of new techniques. It is critical to manage this unstructured information through a centralized knowledge management platform. Knowledge management is the process of managing information within an organization. This involves creating, collecting, organizing, and storing information in a way that makes it easily accessible and usable. The research involved the development textual knowledge management system, and two use cases were considered for extracting textual knowledge from documents. The first case study focused on the safety-critical documents of a railway enterprise. Safety is of paramount importance in the railway industry. There are several EA documents including manuals, operational procedures, and technical guidelines that contain critical information. Digitalization of these documents is essential for analysing vast amounts of textual knowledge that exist in these documents to improve the safety and security of railway operations. A case study was conducted between the University of Huddersfield and the Railway Safety Standard Board (RSSB) to analyse EA safety documents using Natural language processing (NLP). A graphical user interface was developed that includes various document processing features such as semantic search, document mapping, text summarization, and visualization of key trends. For the second case study, open-source data was utilized, and textual knowledge was extracted. Several features were also developed, including kernel distribution, analysis offkey trends, and sentiment analysis of words (such as unique, positive, and negative) within the documents. Additionally, a heterogeneous framework was designed using CPU/GPU and FPGAs to analyse the computational performance of document mapping

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

    Get PDF
    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

    Full text link
    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    Risk, Need, and Racial Inequality: A Machine Learning Analysis of Rearrest in Juvenile Drug Treatment Courts and Traditional Juvenile Courts

    Get PDF
    Juvenile justice system involvement has many impacts on the lives of youth. This often includes negative outcomes for youth who receive highly punitive treatment rather than more rehabilitative approaches. One approach to reforming the juvenile justice system to be rehabilitative is the use of diversion options, such as Juvenile Drug Treatment Courts (JDTCs). JDTCs are intended to offer more personalized interventions for youth based on their risk and need factors as compared to Tradition Juvenile Court (TJC) settings. To better understand the complex interactions of tailored programming and individual factors for justice-involved youth, an integrated theoretical approach, including the Risk-Need-Responsivity framework and Disproportionate Minority Contact, was used to frame the current study. This study applied machine learning analysis techniques (random forests and logistic regression models) to a rigorous, longitudinal secondary dataset of youth in JDTCs and TJCs to determine which risk and protective factors were most important in predicting rearrest up to 1 year following court intake. The sample included 415 youth from JDTCs and TJCs in 10 jurisdictions across the US. Results revealed that both random forest and logistic regression models performed similarly for each court type as well as the combined sample, and that models were most accurate for the JDTC sample and least accurate for the TJC sample. Highly influential risk factors associated with higher likelihood of having at least one rearrest during the study period included higher scores on the family ineffectiveness scale, social risk scale, and crime and violence screener. Alternatively, highly influential protective factors associated with higher likelihood of not having any rearrests during the study period included not having an assessed risk level assigned to youth and being of Hispanic ethnicity. Race and previous juvenile justice system involvement were not important features in preliminary models and therefore were excluded from final models. Implications for future research, data-driven decision-making practices, and the ethics surrounding the use of machine learning models for juvenile justice involved youth are discussed

    Marchenko-Lippmann-Schwinger inversion

    Get PDF
    Seismic wave reflections recorded at the Earth’s surface provide a rich source of information about the structure of the subsurface. These reflections occur due to changes in the material properties of the Earth; in the acoustic approximation, these are the density of the Earth and the velocity of seismic waves travelling through it. Therefore, there is a physical relationship between the material properties of the Earth and the reflected seismic waves that we observe at the surface. This relationship is non-linear, due to the highly scattering nature of the Earth, and to our inability to accurately reproduce these scattered waves with the low resolution velocity models that are usually available to us. Typically, we linearize the scattering problem by assuming that the waves are singly-scattered, requiring multiple reflections to be removed from recorded data at great effort and with varying degrees of success. This assumption is called the Born approximation. The equation that describes the relationship between the Earth’s properties and the fully-scattering reflection data is called the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, and this equation is linear if the full scattering wavefield inside the Earth could be known. The development of Marchenko methods makes such wavefields possible to estimate using only the surface reflection data and an estimate of the direct wave from the surface to each point in the Earth. Substituting the results from a Marchenko method into the Lippmann-Schwinger equation results in a linear equation that includes all orders of scattering. The aim of this thesis is to determine whether higher orders of scattering improve the linear inverse problem from data to velocities, by comparing linearized inversion under the Born approximation to the inversion of the linear Lippmann-Schwinger equation. This thesis begins by deriving the linear Lippmann-Schwinger and Born inverse problems, and reviewing the theoretical basis for Marchenko methods. By deriving the derivative of the full scattering Green’s function with respect to the model parameters of the Earth, the gradient direction for a new type of least-squares full waveform inversion called Marchenko-Lippmann-Schwinger full waveform inversion is defined that uses all orders of scattering. By recreating the analytical 1D Born inversion of a boxcar perturbation by Beydoun and Tarantola (1988), it is shown that high frequency-sampling density is required to correctly estimate the amplitude of the velocity perturbation. More importantly, even when the scattered wavefield is defined to be singly-scattering and the velocity model perturbation can be found without matrix inversion, Born inversion cannot reproduce the true velocity structure exactly. When the results of analytical inversion are compared to inversions where the inverse matrices have been explicitly calculated, the analytical inversion is found to be superior. All three matrix inversion methods are found to be extremely ill-posed. With regularisation, it is possible to accurately determine the edges of the perturbation, but not the amplitude. Moving from a boxcar perturbation with a homogeneous starting velocity to a many-layered 1D model and a smooth representation of this model as the starting point, it is found that the inversion solution is highly dependent on the starting model. By optimising an iterative inversion in both the model and data domains, it is found that optimising the velocity model misfit does not guarantee improvement in the resulting data misfit, and vice versa. Comparing unregularised inversion to inversions with Tikhonov damping or smoothing applied to the kernel matrix, it is found that strong Tikhonov damping results in the most accurate velocity models. From the consistent under-performance of Lippmann-Schwinger inversion when using Marchenko-derived Green’s functions compared to inversions carried out with true Green’s functions, it is concluded that the fallibility of Marchenko methods results in inferior inversion results. Born and Lippmann-Schwinger inversion are tested on a 2D syncline model. Due to computational limitations, using all sources and receivers in the inversion required limiting the number of frequencies to 5. Without regularisation, the model update is uninterpretable due to the presence of strong oscillations across the model. With strong Tikhonov damping, the model updates obtained are poorly scaled, have low resolution, and low amplitude oscillatory noise remains. By replacing the inversion of all sources simultaneously with single source inversions, it is possible to reinstate all frequencies within our limited computational resources. These single source model updates can be stacked similarly to migration images to improve the overall model update. As predicted by the 1D analytical inversion, restoring the full frequency bandwidth eliminates the oscillatory noise from the inverse solution. With or without regularisation, Born and Lippmann-Schwinger inversion results are found to be nearly identical. When Marchenko-derived Green’s functions are introduced, the inversion results are worse than either the Born inversion or the Lippmann-Schwinger inversion without Marchenko methods. On this basis, one concludes that the inclusion of higher order scattering does not improve the outcome of solving the linear inverse scattering problem using currently available methods. Nevertheless, some recent developments in the methods used to solve the Marchenko equation hold some promise for improving solutions in future

    30th European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2023)

    Get PDF
    This is the abstract book of 30th European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2023

    Soundscape in Urban Forests

    Get PDF
    This Special Issue of Forests explores the role of soundscapes in urban forested areas. It is comprised of 11 papers involving soundscape studies conducted in urban forests from Asia and Africa. This collection contains six research fields: (1) the ecological patterns and processes of forest soundscapes; (2) the boundary effects and perceptual topology; (3) natural soundscapes and human health; (4) the experience of multi-sensory interactions; (5) environmental behavior and cognitive disposition; and (6) soundscape resource management in forests

    The Perception of K-12 Instrumental Directors in Low-Income Areas on Virtual Learning with Skill Development and Retention

    Get PDF
    Due to the extreme measures taken to protect students from COVID-19 during the pandemic, schools closed their doors, and educators struggled to continue teaching through virtual learning platforms. Performance-based classrooms were encouraged to discover new methods and strategies to motivate students to thrive even though face-to-face rehearsals were restricted. This study examined the experiences secondary music education instrumentalists faced while attempting to utilize synchronous and asynchronous instruction in a 100 percent virtual performance-based environment. This study aimed to understand the negative and positive effects placed on secondary instrumentalists’ performance abilities, fundamental development, and participation/retention since the introduction of virtual learning in low-income areas. The focus of this study also examined the possible benefits of enhancing pedagogical skills through the addition of technological advances to push instrumental instruction and performances on the secondary level. This study followed a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology design. Music educators in low-income DeKalb County communities were interviewed for this study. Participants were requested to share their perspectives and experiences of performance-based virtual learning and results. The study raised the need for future discussions to create and implement a state and national virtual music education guideline that would assist music educators in turning a devastating situation into a blessing for all art programs and their stakeholders

    A Closer Look into Recent Video-based Learning Research: A Comprehensive Review of Video Characteristics, Tools, Technologies, and Learning Effectiveness

    Full text link
    People increasingly use videos on the Web as a source for learning. To support this way of learning, researchers and developers are continuously developing tools, proposing guidelines, analyzing data, and conducting experiments. However, it is still not clear what characteristics a video should have to be an effective learning medium. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of 257 articles on video-based learning for the period from 2016 to 2021. One of the aims of the review is to identify the video characteristics that have been explored by previous work. Based on our analysis, we suggest a taxonomy which organizes the video characteristics and contextual aspects into eight categories: (1) audio features, (2) visual features, (3) textual features, (4) instructor behavior, (5) learners activities, (6) interactive features (quizzes, etc.), (7) production style, and (8) instructional design. Also, we identify four representative research directions: (1) proposals of tools to support video-based learning, (2) studies with controlled experiments, (3) data analysis studies, and (4) proposals of design guidelines for learning videos. We find that the most explored characteristics are textual features followed by visual features, learner activities, and interactive features. Text of transcripts, video frames, and images (figures and illustrations) are most frequently used by tools that support learning through videos. The learner activity is heavily explored through log files in data analysis studies, and interactive features have been frequently scrutinized in controlled experiments. We complement our review by contrasting research findings that investigate the impact of video characteristics on the learning effectiveness, report on tasks and technologies used to develop tools that support learning, and summarize trends of design guidelines to produce learning video
    • …
    corecore