Enhancing geographical information systems capabilities with multi-criteria evaluation functions

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UGENT-LT3 SCATE Submission for WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

This paper describes the submission of the UGENT-LT3 SCATE system to the WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE), viz. English-German word and sentence-level QE. Based on the observation that the data set is homogeneous (all sentences belong to the IT domain), we performed bilingual terminology extraction and added features derived from the resulting term list to the well-performing features of the word-level QE task of last year. For sentence-level QE, we analyzed the importance of the features and based on those insights extended the feature set of last year. We also experimented with different learning methods and ensembles. We present our observations from the different experiments we conducted and our submissions for both tasks

Evaluation of Drought Indices Based on Thermal Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration over the Continental United States

The reliability of standard meteorological drought indices based on measurements of precipitation is limited by the spatial distribution and quality of currently available rainfall data. Furthermore, they reflect only one component of the surface hydrologic cycle, and they cannot readily capture nonprecipitation-based moisture inputs to the land surface system (e.g., irrigation) that may temper drought impacts or variable rates of water consumption across a landscape. This study assesses the value of a new drought index based on remote sensing of evapotranspiration (ET). The evaporative stress index (ESI) quantifies anomalies in the ratio of actual to potential ET (PET), mapped using thermal band imagery from geostationary satellites. The study investigates the behavior and response time scales of the ESI through a retrospective comparison with the standardized precipitation indices and Palmer drought index suite, and with drought classifications recorded in the U.S. Drought Monitor for the 2000–09 growing seasons. Spatial and temporal correlation analyses suggest that the ESI performs similarly to short-term (up to 6 months) precipitation-based indices but can be produced at higher spatial resolution and without requiring any precipitation data. Unique behavior is observed in the ESI in regions where the evaporative flux is enhanced by moisture sources decoupled from local rainfall: for example, in areas of intense irrigation or shallow water table. Normalization by PET serves to isolate the ET signal component responding to soil moisture variability from variations due to the radiation load. This study suggests that the ESI is a useful complement to the current suite of drought indicators, with particular added value in parts of the world where rainfall data are sparse or unreliable

Multi-Hypothesis Parsing of Tabular Data in Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files

Tabular data on the web comes in various formats and shapes. Preparing data for data analysis and integration requires manual steps which go beyond simple parsing of the data. The preparation includes steps like correct configuration of the parser, removing of meaningless rows, casting of data types and reshaping of the table structure. The goal of this thesis is the development of a robust and modular system which is able to automatically transform messy CSV data sources into a tidy tabular data structure. The highly diverse corpus of CSV files from the UK open data hub will serve as a basis for the evaluation of the system

Simulating Flying Insects Using Dynamics and Data-Driven Noise Modeling to Generate Diverse Collective Behaviors

We present a biologically plausible dynamics model to simulate swarms of flying insects. Our formulation, which is based on biological conclusions and experimental observations, is designed to simulate large insect swarms of varying densities. We use a force-based model that captures different interactions between the insects and the environment and computes collision-free trajectories for each individual insect. Furthermore, we model the noise as a constructive force at the collective level and present a technique to generate noise-induced insect movements in a large swarm that are similar to those observed in real-world trajectories. We use a data-driven formulation that is based on pre-recorded insect trajectories. We also present a novel evaluation metric and a statistical validation approach that takes into account various characteristics of insect motions. In practice, the combination of Curl noise function with our dynamics model is used to generate realistic swarm simulations and emergent behaviors. We highlight its performance for simulating large flying swarms of midges, fruit fly, locusts and moths and demonstrate many collective behaviors, including aggregation, migration, phase transition, and escape responses

Application of special-purpose digital computers to rotorcraft real-time simulation

The use of an array processor as a computational element in rotorcraft real-time simulation is studied. A multilooping scheme was considered in which the rotor would loop over its calculations a number of time while the remainder of the model cycled once on a host computer. To prove that such a method would realistically simulate rotorcraft, a FORTRAN program was constructed to emulate a typical host-array processor computing configuration. The multilooping of an expanded rotor model, which included appropriate kinematic equations, resulted in an accurate and stable simulation