10,937 research outputs found
Emerging research directions in computer science : contributions from the young informatics faculty in Karlsruhe
In order to build better human-friendly human-computer interfaces,
such interfaces need to be enabled with capabilities to perceive
the user, his location, identity, activities and in particular his interaction
with others and the machine. Only with these perception capabilities
can smart systems ( for example human-friendly robots or smart environments) become posssible. In my research I\u27m thus focusing on the
development of novel techniques for the visual perception of humans and
their activities, in order to facilitate perceptive multimodal interfaces,
humanoid robots and smart environments. My work includes research
on person tracking, person identication, recognition of pointing gestures,
estimation of head orientation and focus of attention, as well as
audio-visual scene and activity analysis. Application areas are humanfriendly
humanoid robots, smart environments, content-based image and
video analysis, as well as safety- and security-related applications. This
article gives a brief overview of my ongoing research activities in these
areas
Multicomponent multisublattice alloys, nonconfigurational entropy and other additions to the Alloy Theoretic Automated Toolkit
A number of new functionalities have been added to the Alloy Theoretic
Automated Toolkit (ATAT) since it was last reviewed in this journal in 2002.
ATAT can now handle multicomponent multisublattice alloy systems,
nonconfigurational sources of entropy (e.g. vibrational and electronic
entropy), Special Quasirandom Structures (SQS) generation, tensorial cluster
expansion construction and includes interfaces for multiple atomistic or ab
initio codes. This paper presents an overview of these features geared towards
the practical use of the code. The extensions to the cluster expansion
formalism needed to cover multicomponent multisublattice alloys are also
formally demonstrated.Comment: Code available from http://www.alum.mit.edu/www/avdw/ata
Campus Mobility for the Future: The Electric Bicycle
Sustainable and practical personal mobility solutions for campus environments have traditionally revolved around the use of bicycles, or provision of pedestrian facilities. However many campus environments also experience traffic congestion, parking difficulties and pollution from fossil-fuelled vehicles. It appears that pedal power alone has not been sufficient to supplant the use of petrol and diesel vehicles to date, and therefore it is opportune to investigate both the reasons behind the continual use of environmentally unfriendly transport, and consider potential solutions. This paper presents the results from a year-long study into electric bicycle effectiveness for a large tropical campus, identifying barriers to bicycle use that can be overcome through the availability of public use electric bicycles
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
QuantumATK: An integrated platform of electronic and atomic-scale modelling tools
QuantumATK is an integrated set of atomic-scale modelling tools developed
since 2003 by professional software engineers in collaboration with academic
researchers. While different aspects and individual modules of the platform
have been previously presented, the purpose of this paper is to give a general
overview of the platform. The QuantumATK simulation engines enable
electronic-structure calculations using density functional theory or
tight-binding model Hamiltonians, and also offers bonded or reactive empirical
force fields in many different parametrizations. Density functional theory is
implemented using either a plane-wave basis or expansion of electronic states
in a linear combination of atomic orbitals. The platform includes a long list
of advanced modules, including Green's-function methods for electron transport
simulations and surface calculations, first-principles electron-phonon and
electron-photon couplings, simulation of atomic-scale heat transport, ion
dynamics, spintronics, optical properties of materials, static polarization,
and more. Seamless integration of the different simulation engines into a
common platform allows for easy combination of different simulation methods
into complex workflows. Besides giving a general overview and presenting a
number of implementation details not previously published, we also present four
different application examples. These are calculations of the phonon-limited
mobility of Cu, Ag and Au, electron transport in a gated 2D device, multi-model
simulation of lithium ion drift through a battery cathode in an external
electric field, and electronic-structure calculations of the
composition-dependent band gap of SiGe alloys.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Physics: Condensed Matte
Z2SAL: a translation-based model checker for Z
Despite being widely known and accepted in industry, the Z formal specification language has not so far been well supported by automated verification tools, mostly because of the challenges in handling the abstraction of the language. In this paper we discuss a novel approach to building a model-checker for Z, which involves implementing a translation from Z into SAL, the input language for the Symbolic Analysis Laboratory, a toolset which includes a number of model-checkers and a simulator. The Z2SAL translation deals with a number of important issues, including: mapping unbounded, abstract specifications into bounded, finite models amenable to a BDD-based symbolic checker; converting a non-constructive and piecemeal style of functional specification into a deterministic, automaton-based style of specification; and supporting the rich set-based vocabulary of the Z mathematical toolkit. This paper discusses progress made towards implementing as complete and faithful a translation as possible, while highlighting certain assumptions, respecting certain limitations and making use of available optimisations. The translation is illustrated throughout with examples; and a complete working example is presented, together with performance data
A primitive machine learning tool for the mechanical property prediction of multiple principal element alloys
Multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs) are produced by combining metallic
elements in what is a diverse range of proportions. MPEAs reported to date have
revealed promising performance due to their exceptional mechanical properties.
Training a machine learning (ML) model on known performance data is a
reasonable method to rationalise the complexity of composition dependent
mechanical properties of MPEAs. This study utilises data from a specifically
curated dataset, that contains information regarding six mechanical properties
of MPEAs. A parser tool was introduced to convert chemical composition of
alloys into the input format of the ML models, and a number of ML models were
applied. Finally, Gradio was used to visualise the ML model predictions and to
create a user-interactive interface. The ML model presented is an initial
primitive model (as it does not factor in aspects such as MPEA production and
processing route), however serves as a an initial user tool, whilst also
providing a workflow for other researchers
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