The Fund's Capacity Development Strategy: Better Policies Through Stronger Institutions

This paper outlines reforms to increase the effectiveness of the Fund's capacity development (CD) program. It builds on the 2008 and 2011 reviews of technical assistance (TA) and the 2008 review of training, which set in motion important changes to make CD more valuable to member countries

Development Partner Group-Health Retreat

Following the publication of the draft Tanzanian Joint Assistance Strategy (JAS) in July 2005 which outlined a medium-term framework for enhancing aid effectiveness through the rationalisation and alignment of development partner approaches, a series of consultations on this draft strategy took place both within government agencies and among Development Partners. The Development Partner Group in Health (DPG-H) took this opportunity to hold a two-day workshop in late September with the first day devoted to discussing the implications of the JAS for Development Partners, Ministry of Health and President's Office Regional Administration and Local Government. The second day was used as a time to internally reflect on the present functioning of the DPG-H Group, identifying ways of enhancing the work of the group in response to the changing environment. Discussions on the first day of the Retreat were structured around the five key elements of the JAS, i.e., Sector Dialogue, Aid Modalities, TA and Capacity Building, Division of Labour and Monitoring & Evaluation. Presentations were made by Development Partners with input/comments and clarification given by the Ministry of Health, President's Office Regional Administration and Local Government; and Ministry of Finance. Group work was undertaken in the afternoon to further address pertinent issues that were raised from the plenary discussions in the morning session. This resulted in a number of recommendations that included the following: supporting an effective division of labour; harmonising support with government plans and priorities irrespective of the funding modality; complementarity and coordination enhanced between the various aid modalities; basket funding to continue as a transition towards General Budget Support (GBS); demand driven technical assistance; and over time developing an agreed competency/profile skills mix of health development partners. The second day was an opportunity for members of the DPG-H to come together and reflect on the work of the group - where it had come from, the current functioning of the group (strengths/challenges) and looking forward. A number of presentations were made that covered the background of the group; the history of the Sector Wide Approach (SWAp) and the role of development partners; the sector dialogue structures, the expectations and challenges with respect to communication; strengthening the ways of working as a group and the development of an activity plan for prioritising activities. During the plenary sessions a number of recommendations were agreed that included better structuring of the DPG-H meetings; regularity of meetings (once month but more frequently when required); enhancing the coherency and linkages with the overall Development Partner Group; developing and agreeing a work plan and communication strategy; re-visiting the division of labour in terms of roles and responsibilities; putting in place a fully staffed DPG-H Secretariat and organising a troika chairing structure for the group. Moreover, a number of critical suggestions and recommendations were made for further strengthening sector dialogue that centred around revising the structure of the SWAp. As they had implications beyond the mandate of the DPG-H, it was concluded that this would require further discussions, elaboration and agreement by the Ministry of Health/PORALG.\u

Decentralized congestion management for multilateral transactions based on optimal resource allocation

This paper proposes a decentralized model for dc load flow based congestion management for the forward markets via Optimal Resource Allocation (ORA). The available thermal capacities of possible congested transmission lines are considered as commonly shared resources for all bilateral and multilateral transactions in the market. In our model, each transaction maximizes its profit under the limits of transmission line capacities allocated by the ISO. The ISO searches the optimal allocation of line capacities to each transaction. Finally, the same market efficiency (social welfare) as centralized optimization can be reached. The ORA-based decentralized approach is more suitable for power market environment, since it always keeps the intermediate solution feasible during the iterations and does not require each transaction to submit their private and sensitive information. The mathematical model, computation procedure and relevant proof are presented. The computer test results from the IEEE 30 bus system illustrate the effectiveness of proposed approach. © 2007 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Smart grids as distributed learning control

The topic of smart grids has received a lot of attention but from a scientific point of view it is a highly imprecise concept. This paper attempts to describe what could ultimately work as a control process to fulfill the aims usually stated for such grids without throwing away some important principles established by the pioneers in power system control. In modern terms, we need distributed (or multi-agent) learning control which is suggested to work with a certain consensus mechanism which appears to leave room for achieving cyber-physical security, robustness and performance goals. © 2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Cities and climate change: Strategic options for philanthropic support

Now, more than ever, cities are at the front lines of U.S. climate action. As national action stalls, there is still a daunting amount to be done in reducing human-generated climate emissions. Fortunately, this report comes in the wake of a groundswell of initiatives to engage on climate change by cities, countries, and states across the U.S. Several important and thorough reports on the types of mitigation actions cities can take have recently been released. We already have examples of cities taking significant leadership roles in reducing their own climate emissions, from New York and Boston to Austin, Boulder, and Los Angeles - yet U.S. climate emissions continue to rise, and cities have an outsized role to play. The purpose of this project is to review current U.S. city climate activities in order to identify areas where additional investment by foundations could help accelerate city action to reduce urban greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of the inquiry is on aggressive actions cities can take that significantly increase their “level of ambition” to achieve emissions reductions on an accelerated timetable. City strategies on climate adaptation are not encompassed in this project. [TRUNCATED

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's Tropical Disease Research Program: A 25-Year Retrospective Review 1976-1999

Documents and details the foundation's commitment to the program from its inception, and provides an analysis of its successes until the completion of the program in 1999

ERIGrid Holistic Test Description for Validating Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Smart energy solutions aim to modify and optimise the operation of existing energy infrastructure. Such cyber-physical technology must be mature before deployment to the actual infrastructure, and competitive solutions will have to be compliant to standards still under development. Achieving this technology readiness and harmonisation requires reproducible experiments and appropriately realistic testing environments. Such testbeds for multi-domain cyber-physical experiments are complex in and of themselves. This work addresses a method for the scoping and design of experiments where both testbed and solution each require detailed expertise. This empirical work first revisited present test description approaches, developed a newdescription method for cyber-physical energy systems testing, and matured it by means of user involvement. The new Holistic Test Description (HTD) method facilitates the conception, deconstruction and reproduction of complex experimental designs in the domains of cyber-physical energy systems. This work develops the background and motivation, offers a guideline and examples to the proposed approach, and summarises experience from three years of its application.This work received funding in the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (H2020/2014–2020) under project “ERIGrid” (Grant Agreement No. 654113)

Implementação e avaliação no system generator de um sistema cooperativo para os futuros sistemas 5G

With the arrival of 5G it is expected the proliferation of services in the different fields such as healthcare, utility applications, industrial automation, 4K streaming, that the former networks can not provide. Additionally, the total number of wireless communication devices will escalate in such a manner that the already scarce available frequency bandwidth won’t be enough to pack the intended objectives. Cisco’s Annual Internet Report from 2018 predicts that by 2023 there will be nearly 30 billion devices capable of wireless communication. Due to the exponential expiation of both services and devices, the challenges upon both network data capacity and efficient radio resourse use will be greater than ever, thus the urgency for solutions is grand. Both the capacity for wireless communications and spectral efficiency are related to cell size and its users proximity to the access point. Thus, shortening the distance between the transmitter and the receiver improves both aspects of the network. This concept is what motivates the implementation of heterogeneous networks, HetNets, that are composed of many different small-cells, SCs, overlaid across the same coexisting area of a conventional macro-cell, shortening the distance between the cell users and its access point transceivers, granting a better coverage and higher data rates. However, the HetNets potential does not come without any challenges, as these networks suffer considerably from communication interference between cells. Although some interference management algorithms that allow coexistence between cells have been proposed in recent years, most of them were evaluated by software simulations and not implemented in real-time platforms. Therefore, this master thesis aims to give the first step on the implementation and evaluation of an interference mitigation technique in hardware. Specifically, it is assumed a downlink scenario composed by a macro-cell base station, a macro-cell primary user and a small cell user, with the aim of implementing an algorithm that eliminates the downlink interference that the base station may cause to the secondary users. The study was carried out using the System Generator DSP tool, which is a tool that generates code for hardware from schematics created in it. This tool also offers a wide range of blocks that help the creation, and fundamentally, the simulation and study of the system to be implemented, before being translated into hardware. The results obtained in this work are a faithful representation of the behavior of the implemented system, which can be used for a future application for FPGA.Com a chegada do 5G, espera-se a proliferação de serviços nas mais diversas áreas tal como assistência médica, automação industrial, transmissão em 4k, que não eram possíveis nas redes das gerações anteriores. Além deste fenómeno, o número total de dispositivos capazes de conexões wireless aumentará de tal maneira que a escassa largura de banda disponível não será suficiente para abranger os objetivos pretendidos. O Relatório Anual de 2018 sobre a Internet da Cisco prevê que até 2023 haverá quase 30 bilhões de dispositivos capazes de comunicação sem fio. Devido ao aumento exponencial de serviços e dispositivos, os desafios sobre a capacidade de dados da rede e o udo eficiente dos recursos de rádio serão maiores que nunca. Por estes motivos, a necessidade de soluções para estas lacunas é enorme. Tanto a capacidade da rede e o uso eficiente do espectro de frequências estão relacionados ao tamanho da célula e à proximidade dos usuários com o ponto de acesso da célula. Ao encurtar a distância entre o transmissor e o recetor ocorre um melhoramento destes dois aspetos da rede. Este é o principal conceito na implementação de redes heterogéneas, HetNets, que são compostas por diversas células pequenas que coexistem na área de uma macro célula convencional, diminuído a distância entre os utilizadores da célula e os pontos de acesso, garantindo uma melhor cobertura e taxa de dados mais elevadas. No entanto, o potencial das HatNets não vem sem nenhum custo, pois estas redes sofrem consideravelmente de interferência entre as células. Embora nos últimos anos foram propostos alguns algoritmos que permitem a coexistência das células, a maioria destes foi só testado em simulações de software e não em plataformas em tempo real. Por esse motivo, esta dissertação de mestrado visa dar o primeiro passo na implementação e a avaliação de uma técnica de mitigação de interferência em hardware. Mais especificamente no cenário de downlink entre uma estação base de uma macro célula, um utilizador primário da macro célula e um utilizador secundário de uma célula pequena, com o principal objetivo de cancelar a interferência que a estação base possa fazer ao utilizador secundário. O estudo foi realizado utilizando a ferramenta System Generator DSP, que é uma ferramenta que gera código para hardware a partir de esquemáticos criados na mesma. Esta ferramenta também oferece uma vasta gama de blocos que ajudam a criação, e fundamentalmente, a simulação e o estudo do sistema a implementar antes de ser traduzido para hardware. Os resultados obtidos neste trabalho são uma fiel representação do comportamento do sistema implementado. O quais podem ser utilizados para uma futura aplicação para FPGA.Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e Telecomunicaçõe