Computational intelligence for measuring macro-knowledge competitiveness

The aim of this research is to investigate the utilisation of Computational Intelligence methods for constructing Synthetic Composite Indicators (SCI). In particular for delivering a Unified Macro-Knowledge Competitiveness Indicator (UKCI) to enable consistent and transparent assessments and forecasting of the progress and competitiveness of Knowledge Based Economy (KBE). SCI are assessment tools usually constructed to evaluate and contrast entities performance by aggregating intangible measures in many areas such as economy, education, technology and innovation. SCI key value is inhibited in its capacity to aggregate complex and multi-dimensional variables into a single meaningful value. As a result, SCIs have been considered as one of the most important tools for macro-level and strategic decision making. Considering the shortcomings of the existing SCI, this study is proposing an alternative approach to develop Intelligent Synthetic Composite Indicators (iSCI). The suggested approach utilizes Fuzzy Proximity Knowledge Mining technique to build the qualitative taxonomy initially, and Fuzzy c-mean is employed to form the new composite indicators

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

Siting Study for a Hydrokinetic Energy Project Located Offshore Southeastern Florida: Protocols for Survey Methodology for Offshore Marine Hydrokinetic Energy Projects

Dehlsen Associates, LLC was awarded a grant by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Golden Field Office for a project titled “Siting Study Framework and Survey Methodology for Marine and Hydrokinetic Energy Project in Offshore Southeast Florida,” corresponding to DOE Grant Award Number DE-EE0002655 resulting from DOE funding Opportunity Announcement Number DE-FOA- 0000069 for Topic Area 2, and it is referred to herein as “the project.” The purpose of the project was to enhance the certainty of the survey requirements and regulatory review processes for the purpose of reducing the time, efforts, and costs associated with initial siting efforts of marine and hydrokinetic energy conversion facilities that may be proposed in the Atlantic Ocean offshore Southeast Florida. To secure early input from agencies, protocols were developed for collecting baseline geophysical information and benthic habitat data that can be used by project developers and regulators to make decisions early in the process of determining project location (i.e., the siting process) that avoid or minimize adverse impacts to sensitive marine benthic habitat. It is presumed that such an approach will help facilitate the licensing process for hydrokinetic and other ocean renewable energy projects within the study area and will assist in clarifying the baseline environmental data requirements described in the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (formerly Minerals Management Service) final regulations on offshore renewable energy (30 Code of Federal Regulations 285, published April 29, 2009). Because projects generally seek to avoid or minimize impacts to sensitive marine habitats, it was not the intent of this project to investigate areas that did not appear suitable for the siting of ocean renewable energy projects. Rather, a two-tiered approach was designed with the first step consisting of gaining overall insight about seabed conditions offshore southeastern Florida by conducting a geophysical survey of pre-selected areas with subsequent post-processing and expert data interpretation by geophysicists and experienced marine biologists knowledgeable about the general project area. The second step sought to validate the benthic habitat types interpreted from the geophysical data by conducting benthic video and photographic field surveys of selected habitat types. The goal of this step was to determine the degree of correlation between the habitat types interpreted from the geophysical data and what actually exists on the seafloor based on the benthic video survey logs. This step included spot-checking selected habitat types rather than comprehensive evaluation of the entire area covered by the geophysical survey. It is important to note that non-invasive survey methods were used as part of this study and no devices of any kind were either temporarily or permanently attached to the seabed as part of the work conducted under this project

Oceanus.

v. 26, no. 3 (1983

Commercial Helicopter Services: Toward Quantitative Solutions for Understanding Industry Phenomena and Achieving Stakeholder Optimization

An understanding of industry phenomena and optimization techniques within the upstream energy industry’s transportation sector is markedly absent in the extant literature and suitable for rigorous investigation. This manuscript presents analyses related to the optimization of offshore worker transportation and econometric analyses of factors influencing commercial helicopter operators’ stock returns, which are represented throughout the manuscript as Part I and Part II, respectively. The global energy industry transports supplies and personnel via helicopter to offshore locations and has been increasingly focusing on optimizing upstream logistics. Using a unique sample of deepwater and ultra-deepwater permanent offshore locations in the Gulf of Mexico, transportation networks consisting of 58 locations operated by 19 firms are optimized via a randomized greedy algorithm. The model developed in Part I has been found to effectively solve the complex transportation problem and simulation results show the potential advantages of alternative clustered and integrated network structures, as compared to an independent firm-level structure. The evaluation of clustered and integrated network structures, which allow ride sharing via energy firm cooperation, provides evidence that such network structures may yield cost reductions for participating firms. The extent to which commercial helicopter operators’ stock returns are related to commodity prices and other relevant industry variables is absent in the extant literature. Often, firms attribute favorable results to internal factors whereas unfavorable results are attributed to external factors. Using a unique data set from 2013-2018, the current research identifies structural relationships between crude oil prices, natural gas prices, the rotary rig count, a subset of the overall market, firms’ degree of diversification and stock returns of commercial helicopter operators. Empirical analyses developed in Part II show that the prevalent price of crude oil and the overall market environment possess explanatory power of commercial helicopter firms’ stock returns, ceteris paribus. Specifically, 10% increases in the crude oil price and the S&P 500 index yield a 2.7% and 8.0% increase in stock returns, respectively. Collectively, the abovementioned parts of this manuscript provide rigorous, quantitative analyses of topics unrepresented within the extant literature, which are foundational for future practice and research. Specifically, new knowledge regarding a practical approach to model development and solution deliverance for the transportation of offshore workers to their respective locations and factors influencing commercial helicopter operators’ stock returns has been appropriately designed and empirically evaluated

Delivering IoT Services in Smart Cities and Environmental Monitoring through Collective Awareness, Mobile Crowdsensing and Open Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the paradigm that allows us to interact with the real world by means of networking-enabled devices and convert physical phenomena into valuable digital knowledge. Such a rapidly evolving field leveraged the explosion of a number of technologies, standards and platforms. Consequently, different IoT ecosystems behave as closed islands and do not interoperate with each other, thus the potential of the number of connected objects in the world is far from being totally unleashed. Typically, research efforts in tackling such challenge tend to propose a new IoT platforms or standards, however, such solutions find obstacles in keeping up the pace at which the field is evolving. Our work is different, in that it originates from the following observation: in use cases that depend on common phenomena such as Smart Cities or environmental monitoring a lot of useful data for applications is already in place somewhere or devices capable of collecting such data are already deployed. For such scenarios, we propose and study the use of Collective Awareness Paradigms (CAP), which offload data collection to a crowd of participants. We bring three main contributions: we study the feasibility of using Open Data coming from heterogeneous sources, focusing particularly on crowdsourced and user-contributed data that has the drawback of being incomplete and we then propose a State-of-the-Art algorith that automatically classifies raw crowdsourced sensor data; we design a data collection framework that uses Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) and puts the participants and the stakeholders in a coordinated interaction together with a distributed data collection algorithm that prevents the users from collecting too much or too less data; (3) we design a Service Oriented Architecture that constitutes a unique interface to the raw data collected through CAPs through their aggregation into ad-hoc services, moreover, we provide a prototype implementation

Effects of Offshore Oil and Gas Development: A Current Awareness Bibliography

This bibliography is a compilation of current publications (citations with abstracts) from a wide variety of electronic and print information sources relating to offshore oil and gas development. Subject categories covered include: Biology: Ecological, anatomical, and physiological effects of oil and/or gas, Species as biomarkers, PAH uptake and bioaccumulation, etc. Chemistry/Geochemistry/Geology: Biochemistry, Biodegradation, Bioremediation, Hydrocarbon degradation, Environmental sampling, Soil contamination, etc. Engineering/Physics: Technological advancements in facility/equipment design and use, Spill response and recovery equipment, Physical properties of oil and gas, etc. Environment/Ecosystem Management/Spills: Environmental assessment and management, Oil and/or gas spill description and analysis, etc. Socioeconomic/Regulation/General: Social and economic ramifications, Politics, Governmental policy and legislation, Organizational policy, General interest, etc

Environmental survey of potential sand resource sites, offshore Delaware and Maryland : Final Report

Technical summary / Carl H. Hobbs Non-technical summary / Carl H. Hobbs Part. 1. Benthic mapping and resource evaluation of potential sand mining areas, offshore Mayland and Delaware, 1998-1999 / G.R. Cutter and R.J. Diaz Part. 2. Transitory species (vertebrate nekton) / John A. Musick Part. 3. Literature survey of reproductive finfish and ichthyoplankton present in proposed sand mining locations within the Middle Atlantic Bight / John Olney, Donna Marie Bilkovic Part. 4. Potential modifications to waves due to dredging and other oceanographic considerations / Jerome P.-Y. Maa, Sung C. Kim Part. 5. Maryland-Delaware shoreline : long-term trends and short-term variability / C.S. Hardaway, D.A. Milligan, R.C.H. Brindley, C.H. Hobbs

Phytomining of precious metals from mine wastes

The increasing demand for precious metals such as palladium and gold for industrial applications has led to the exploration of sustainable environmental-friendly technologies to capture and recycle these metals from mine wastes. Phytomining is an emerging technology that makes use of the ability of plants to extract and accumulate metals from soil and water. Chapter 3 discusses the potential of phytomining to recover palladium from mine waste materials. These studies determined that willow (Salix sp.) and miscanthus (Miscanthus giganteus) were able to accumulate high levels of palladium in the aerial tissues when grown on synthetic media containing palladium as well as on mine waste materials. The use of chemical lixiviants improved the uptake and translocation of palladium in both willow and miscanthus. The potential of palladium nanoparticle formation in plants as plant-based catalysts was investigated but no palladium nanoparticles were detected when the plants were grown on synthetic mine waste. Chapter 4 evaluates the potential of merA gene for mercuric reductase in Arabidopsis as a genetic engineering approach to improve tolerance to gold and palladium in plants. In contrast to previously published findings merA expression did not increase tolerance of the transgenic plants to toxic levels of gold and palladium. Inhibition studies on purified mercuric reductase further revealed that gold and palladium inhibited the activity of MerA with ionic mercury. In Chapter 5, the potential of synthetic biology strategy was also investigated where the expression of synthetic short peptides, which are shown to be responsible in the formation of various sizes of metal nanoparticles in vitro, were found to increase the formation of smaller sized gold nanoparticles (<10 nm diameter) compared to wild type plants when expressed in Arabidopsis. Chapter 6 describes the transcriptional response of Arabidopsis to precious metals and investigates the potential involvement of heavy metal transporter 5 (AtHMA5) in the detoxification mechanism for gold and palladium. AtHMA5 was found to be strongly up regulated in response to gold and palladium. However, studies with Arabidopsis hma5-1 mutant knockout lines and yeast heterologous expression studies demonstrated that gold and palladium is not a substrate for AtHMA5 suggesting that AtHMA5 is not involved in gold and palladium detoxification. Overall, this work is the first to describe a holistic approach in searching for suitable field applicable plant candidates for phytomining of precious metals such as palladium and gold as well as strategies to improve its uptake, tolerance and nanoparticle formation in plants