A Dissociation of Attention and Awareness in Phase-sensitive but Not Phase-insensitive Visual Channels

The elements most vivid in our conscious awareness are the ones to which we direct our attention. Scientific study confirms the impression of a close bond between selective attention and visual awareness, yet the nature of this association remains elusive. Using visual afterimages as an index, we investigate neural processing of stimuli as they enter awareness and as they become the object of attention. We find evidence of response enhancement accompanying both attention and awareness, both in the phase-sensitive neural channels characteristic of early processing stages and in the phase-insensitive channels typical of higher cortical areas. The effects of attention and awareness on phase-insensitive responses are positively correlated, but in the same experiments, we observe no correlation between the effects on phase-sensitive responses. This indicates independent signatures of attention and awareness in early visual areas yet a convergence of their effects at more advanced processing stages

The Role of Behavioural Economics in Energy and Climate Policy

This article explores how behavioural economics can be applied to energy and climate policy. We present an overview of main concepts of behavioural economics and discuss how they differ from the assumptions of neoclassical economics. Next, we discuss how behavioural economics applies to three areas of energy policy: (1) consumption and habits, (2) investment in energy efficiency, and (3) provision of public goods and support for pro-environmental behaviour. We conclude that behavioural economics seems unlikely to provide the magic bullet to reduce energy consumption by the magnitude required by the International Energy Agency's “450” climate policy scenario. However it offers new suggestions as to where to start looking for potentially sustainable changes in energy consumption. We believe that the most useful role within climate policy is in addressing issues of public perception of the affordability of climate policy and in facilitating the creation of a more responsive energy demand, better capable of responding to weather-induced changes in renewable electricity supply

Final report on the evaluation of RRM/CRRM algorithms

Deliverable public del projecte EVERESTThis deliverable provides a definition and a complete evaluation of the RRM/CRRM algorithms selected in D11 and D15, and evolved and refined on an iterative process. The evaluation will be carried out by means of simulations using the simulators provided at D07, and D14.Preprin

A sub-mW IoT-endnode for always-on visual monitoring and smart triggering

This work presents a fully-programmable Internet of Things (IoT) visual sensing node that targets sub-mW power consumption in always-on monitoring scenarios. The system features a spatial-contrast $128\mathrm{x}64$ binary pixel imager with focal-plane processing. The sensor, when working at its lowest power mode ($10\mu W$ at 10 fps), provides as output the number of changed pixels. Based on this information, a dedicated camera interface, implemented on a low-power FPGA, wakes up an ultra-low-power parallel processing unit to extract context-aware visual information. We evaluate the smart sensor on three always-on visual triggering application scenarios. Triggering accuracy comparable to RGB image sensors is achieved at nominal lighting conditions, while consuming an average power between $193\mu W$ and $277\mu W$, depending on context activity. The digital sub-system is extremely flexible, thanks to a fully-programmable digital signal processing engine, but still achieves 19x lower power consumption compared to MCU-based cameras with significantly lower on-board computing capabilities.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, submitteted to IEEE IoT Journa

Performance Limits and Geometric Properties of Array Localization

Location-aware networks are of great importance and interest in both civil and military applications. This paper determines the localization accuracy of an agent, which is equipped with an antenna array and localizes itself using wireless measurements with anchor nodes, in a far-field environment. In view of the Cram\'er-Rao bound, we first derive the localization information for static scenarios and demonstrate that such information is a weighed sum of Fisher information matrices from each anchor-antenna measurement pair. Each matrix can be further decomposed into two parts: a distance part with intensity proportional to the squared baseband effective bandwidth of the transmitted signal and a direction part with intensity associated with the normalized anchor-antenna visual angle. Moreover, in dynamic scenarios, we show that the Doppler shift contributes additional direction information, with intensity determined by the agent velocity and the root mean squared time duration of the transmitted signal. In addition, two measures are proposed to evaluate the localization performance of wireless networks with different anchor-agent and array-antenna geometries, and both formulae and simulations are provided for typical anchor deployments and antenna arrays.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor