Water in the Green Economy: Capacity Development Aspects

This book discusses needs related to capacity development for water resources management, including water supply and sanitation, in the context of the green economy. It showcases theoretical and practical approaches with proven success. Most contributions come from members and partners within the interagency mechanism, UN-Water. The 11 case studies in this book range from innovative design and delivery of capacity development programs related to water in the green economy, market mechanisms, and quality control procedures supporting capacity development success towards the practical implementation of programs to enhance individual and institutional capacity

Learning to infer: RL-based search for DNN primitive selection on Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

Deep Learning is increasingly being adopted by industry for computer vision applications running on embedded devices. While Convolutional Neural Networks' accuracy has achieved a mature and remarkable state, inference latency and throughput are a major concern especially when targeting low-cost and low-power embedded platforms. CNNs' inference latency may become a bottleneck for Deep Learning adoption by industry, as it is a crucial specification for many real-time processes. Furthermore, deployment of CNNs across heterogeneous platforms presents major compatibility issues due to vendor-specific technology and acceleration libraries. In this work, we present QS-DNN, a fully automatic search based on Reinforcement Learning which, combined with an inference engine optimizer, efficiently explores through the design space and empirically finds the optimal combinations of libraries and primitives to speed up the inference of CNNs on heterogeneous embedded devices. We show that, an optimized combination can achieve 45x speedup in inference latency on CPU compared to a dependency-free baseline and 2x on average on GPGPU compared to the best vendor library. Further, we demonstrate that, the quality of results and time "to-solution" is much better than with Random Search and achieves up to 15x better results for a short-time search

Self-tuning run-time reconfigurable PID controller

Digital PID control algorithm is one of the most commonly used algorithms in the control systems area. This algorithm is very well known, it is simple, easily implementable in the computer control systems and most of all its operation is very predictable. Thus PID control has got well known impact on the control system behavior. However, in its simple form the controller have no reconfiguration support. In a case of the controlled system substantial changes (or the whole control environment, in the wider aspect, for example if the disturbances characteristics would change) it is not possible to make the PID controller robust enough. In this paper a new structure of digital PID controller is proposed, where the policy-based computing is used to equip the controller with the ability to adjust it's behavior according to the environmental changes. Application to the electro-oil evaporator which is a part of distillation installation is used to show the new controller structure in operation

Treatment and valorization plants in materials recovery supply chain

Aim of industrial symbiosis is to create synergies between industries in order to exchange resources (by-products, water and energy) through geographic proximity and collaboration [1]. By optimizing resource flows in a “whole-system approach”, a minimization of dangerous emissions and of supply needs can be achieved. Resources exchanges are established to facilitate recycling and re-use of industrial waste using a commercial vehicle. Several paths can be identified in order to establish an industrial symbiosis network (Figure 1, left), in relation (i) to the life cycle phase (raw material, component, product) and (ii) to the nature (material, water, energy) of the resource flows to be exchanged. Sometimes by-products and/or waste of an industrial process have to be treated and valorized in order to become the raw materials for others. In particular, two main treatment processes can be identified: refurbishment/upgrade for re-use (Figure 1, center) and recycling for material recovery (Figure 1, right). A brief overview of technological and economic aspects is given, together with their relevance to industrial symbiosis

National innovation policy in Cyprus

This paper analyses the concept of national innovation policy (NIP) and puts forward arguments supporting the need for a NIP for small developing economies like Cyprus. A brief outline is given of the science/technology infrastructure and current innovation related policies in Cyprus while the attitudes of owners/managers of private manufacturing firms towards these policies, based on a research survey, are examined. The survey reveals an ambivalent attitude towards NIP, which is probably due to unrealistic expectations, as well as, inefficiency in design and implementation of innovation policy measures. Case research confirms these conclusions and highlights the importance of NIP for private firms despite the rhetoric of their managers against it. The formulation of a specific NIP for Cyprus is then considered, from which lessons for other developing countries are drawn