49 research outputs found
Intelligent Circuits and Systems
ICICS-2020 is the third conference initiated by the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University that explored recent innovations of researchers working for the development of smart and green technologies in the fields of Energy, Electronics, Communications, Computers, and Control. ICICS provides innovators to identify new opportunities for the social and economic benefits of society.ă This conference bridges the gap between academics and R&D institutions, social visionaries, and experts from all strata of society to present their ongoing research activities and foster research relations between them. It provides opportunities for the exchange of new ideas, applications, and experiences in the field of smart technologies and finding global partners for future collaboration. The ICICS-2020 was conducted in two broad categories, Intelligent Circuits & Intelligent Systems and Emerging Technologies in Electrical Engineering
Rethinking construction safety
Recent human-induced disasters have prompted concerns that conventional risk management (quantifying and controlling hazards) is not only reaching its limits but introducing vulnerabilities which increase the probability of accidents. These compliance or behaviour-based approaches can obscure risks, suppress data, and detract from major hazards â feeding complacency and reducing resilience as the workforce becomes disfranchised and deskilled. In response to this, emerging constructs favour non-prescriptive methods for managing risk and look to support the human factors which underpin these. This is known as the âfifthâ or âAdaptiveâ age of safety. Adaptive safety differs from its predecessors in two fundamental ways: Firstly, it refutes notions of accident causation as predictable and, consequently, it casts doubt on our understanding of the human contribution to accidents. Both these undermine traditional risk management models. Instead, an approach is advocated which accounts for complex systemic interactions and interpersonal aspects of risk management. As yet there is a lack of evidence and guidance to support Adaptive safety in industry. The construction sector is particularly challenging with respect to safety because of its litigation culture, affinity for traditional safety, project-based network structure, and transient workforce. The emerging Adaptive paradigm could potentially be a valuable opportunity to improve construction safety: Moving towards engaging workers, drawing on their expertise, increasing vigilance, and enabling a response to the unexpected; however, its applicability to this unique sector is disputed. This research uses mixed qualitative methods to examine the compatibility of Adaptive safety with construction, theoretically and then in practice. The first part of this thesis explores leadership as a means to foster an Adaptive culture in organisations. A framework for âAdaptive safety leadershipâ is synthesised from literature on safety leadership, Safety Intelligence, and Adaptive safety, and evaluated against construction practice in an interview study. The findings show many safety practitioners and policy-makers in construction recognise the need for systems thinking and relational aspects of leadership, but the structure, pressure, and culture of the industry mean the tendency to blame workers and bureaucratise risk is difficult to overcome. The relationships between these systemic âOriginating Influencesâ and the âImmediate Circumstancesâ surrounding accidents are crystallised in an update of Haslam, Hide, Gibb, Gyi, Pavitt, Atkinson and Duffâs (2005) contributing factors in construction accidents (ConCA) model â explaining the challenges to taking an Adaptive approach and demonstrating the value of systems thinking in construction. The second part of this thesis case studies Adaptive safety in practice, following two pioneering infrastructure megaprojects as they embrace Dekkerâs (2017a) âSafety Differentlyâ. Proactivity, relationships, communication, and job-satisfaction are improving as the new philosophy is cultivated and allowed to evolve in collaboration with the workforce. The role of safety leaders in embedding this concept in frontline work and factors contributing to their success are examined. Aspects of the company, project, and Londonâs megaproject ecology have meant Laing OâRourke has been uniquely well-equipped to make this transition, but the sectorâs pace of change and persistent culture have been challenging. These insights contribute an improved understanding of the mechanisms of Adaptive safety and the factors which support and hinder its success with a view to its wider implementation. However, the work also warns against substituting engagement for safety; questions the ethics of responsibilising workers; and stresses the need for a context-sensitive balance of new and old safety paradigms. It highlights the inadequacies of this construct which need to be resolved before it can be operationalised.</div
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Novel Computing Paradigms using Oscillators
This dissertation is concerned with new ways of using oscillators to perform computational tasks. Specifically, it introduces methods for building finite state machines (for general-purpose Boolean computation) as well as Ising machines (for solving combinatorial optimization problems) using coupled oscillator networks.But firstly, why oscillators? Why use them for computation?An important reason is simply that oscillators are fascinating. Coupled oscillator systems often display intriguing synchronization phenomena where spontaneous patterns arise. From the synchronous flashing of fireflies to Huygens' clocks ticking in unison, from the molecular mechanism of circadian rhythms to the phase patterns in oscillatory neural circuits, the observation and study of synchronization in coupled oscillators has a long and rich history. Engineers across many disciplines have also taken inspiration from these phenomena, e.g., to design high-performance radio frequency communication circuits and optical lasers. To be able to contribute to the study of coupled oscillators and leverage them in novel paradigms of computing is without question an interesting andfulfilling quest in and of itself.Moreover, as Moore's Law nears its limits, new computing paradigms that are different from mere conventional complementary metalâoxideâsemiconductor (CMOS) scaling have become an important area of exploration. One broad direction aims to improve CMOS performance using device technology such as fin field-effect transistors (FinFET) and gate-all-around (GAA) FETs. Other new computing schemes are based on non-CMOS material and device technology, e.g., graphene, carbon nanotubes, memristive devices, optical devices, etc.. Another growing trend in both academia and industry is to build digital application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) suitable for speeding up certain computational tasks, often leveraging the parallel nature of unconventional non-von Neumann architectures. These schemes seek to circumvent the limitations posed at the device level through innovations at the system/architecture level.Our work on oscillator-based computation represents a direction that is different from the above and features several points of novelty and attractiveness. Firstly, it makes meaningful use of nonlinear dynamical phenomena to tackle well-defined computational tasks that span analog and digital domains. It also differs from conventional computational systems at the fundamental logic encoding level, using timing/phase of oscillation as opposed to voltage levels to represent logic values. These differences bring about several advantages. The change of logic encoding scheme has several device- and system-level benefits related to noise immunity and interference resistance. The use of nonlinear oscillator dynamics allows our systems to address problems difficult for conventional digital computation. Furthermore, our schemes are amenable to realizations using almost all types of oscillators, allowing a wide variety of devices from multiple physical domains to serve as the substrate for computing. This ability to leverage emerging multiphysics devices need not put off the realization of our ideas far into the future. Instead, implementations using well-established circuit technology are already both practical and attractive.This work also differs from all past work on oscillator-based computing, which mostly focuses on specialized image preprocessing tasks, such as edge detection, image segmentation and pattern recognition. Perhaps its most unique feature is that our systems use transitions between analog and digital modes of operation --- unlike other existing schemes that simply couple oscillators and let their phases settle to a continuum of values, we use a special type of injection locking to make each oscillator settle to one of the several well-defined multistable phase-locked states, which we use to encode logic values for computation. Our schemes of oscillator-based Boolean and Ising computation are built upon this digitization of phase; they expand the scope of oscillator-based computing significantly.Our ideas are built on years of past research in the modelling, simulation and analysis of oscillators. While there is a considerable amount of literature (arguably since Christiaan Huygens wrote about his observation of synchronized pendulum clocks in the 17th century) analyzing the synchronization phenomenon from different perspectives at different levels, we have been able to further develop the theory of injection locking, connecting the dots to find a path of analysis that starts from the low-level differential equations of individual oscillators and arrives at phase-based models and energy landscapes of coupled oscillator systems. This theoretical scaffolding is able not only to explain the operation of oscillator-based systems, but also to serve as the basis for simulation and design tools. Building on this, we explore the practical design of our proposed systems, demonstrate working prototypes, as well as develop the techniques, tools and methodologies essential for the process
NASA Tech Briefs, October 2002
Topics include: a technology focus on sensors, electronic components and systems, software, materials, materials, mechanics, manufacturing, physical sciences, information sciences, book and reports, motion control and a special section of Photonics Tech Briefs
Trusted computing or trust in computing? Legislating for trust networks
This thesis aims to address several issues emerging in the new digital world. Using Trusted Computing as the paradigmatic example of regulation though code that tries to address the cyber security problem that occurs, where the freedom of the user to reconfigure her machine is restricted in exchange for greater, yet not perfect, security. Trusted Computing is a technology that while it aims to protect the user, and the integrity of her machine and her privacy against third party users, it discloses more of her information to trusted third parties, exposing her to security risks in case of compromising occurring to that third party. It also intends to create a decentralized, bottom up solution to security where security follows along the arcs of an emergent ânetwork of trustâ, and if that was viable, to achieve a form of code based regulation. Through the analysis attempted in this thesis, we laid the groundwork for a refined assessment, considering the problems that Trusted Computing Initiative (TCI) faces and that are based in the intentional, systematic but sometimes misunderstood and miscommunicated difference (which as we reveal results directly in certain design choices for TC) between the conception of trust in informatics (âtechno-trustâ) and the common sociological concept of it. To reap the benefits of TCI and create the dynamic ânetwork of trustâ, we need the sociological concept of trust sharing the fundamental characteristics of transitivity and holism which are absent from techno-trust.
This gives rise to our next visited problems which are: if TC shifts the power from the customer to the TC provider, who takes on roles previously reserved for the nation state, then how in a democratic state can users trust those that make the rules? The answer lies partly in constitutional and human rights law and we drill into those functions of TC that makes the TCI provider comparable to state-like and ask what minimal legal guarantees need to be in place to accept, trustingly, this shift of power. Secondly, traditional liberal contract law reduces complex social relations to binary exchange relations, which are not transitive and disrupt rather than create networks. Contract law, as we argue, plays a central role for the way in which the TC provider interacts with his customers and this thesis contributes in speculating of a contract law that does not result in atomism, rather âbrings inâ potentially affected third parties and results in holistic networks. In the same vein, this thesis looks mainly at specific ways in which law can correct or redefine the implicit and democratically not validated shift of power from customer to TC providers while enhancing the social environment and its social trust within which TC must operate
Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995)
The files on this record represent the various databases that originally composed the CD-ROM issue of "Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding" database, which is now part of the Dudley Knox Library's Abstracts and Selected Full Text Documents on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995) Collection. (See Calhoun record https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/57364 for further information on this collection and the bibliography).
Due to issues of technological obsolescence preventing current and future audiences from accessing the bibliography, DKL exported and converted into the three files on this record the various databases contained in the CD-ROM.
The contents of these files are:
1) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_xls.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.xls: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format; RDFA_Glossary.xls: Glossary of terms, in Excel 97-2003 Workbookformat; RDFA_Biographies.xls: Biographies of leading figures, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format];
2) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_csv.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.TXT: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in CSV format; RDFA_Glossary.TXT: Glossary of terms, in CSV format; RDFA_Biographies.TXT: Biographies of leading figures, in CSV format];
3) RDFA_CompleteBibliography.pdf: A human readable display of the bibliographic data, as a means of double-checking any possible deviations due to conversion