The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System

While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions, demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable, and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today

Estimating end-use demand: A Bayesian approach

Eliminating negative end-use or appliance consumption estimates and incorporating direct metering information into the process of generating these estimates; these are two important aspects, of conditional demand analysis (CDA) that will be the focus of this raper. In both cases a Bayesian approach seems a natural way of proceeding. What needs to be investigated is whether it is also a viable and effective approach. In addition, such a framework naturally lends itself to prediction. Our application involves the estimation of electrical appliance consumptions for a sample of Australian households. This application is designed to illustrate the viability of a full Bayesian analysis of the problem

Information and Ecological Behaviour towards the Natural Resources Consumption of the Population of Bucharest

Over the last decades, the consumer’s ecological behaviour has been the topic of intense debates, academic activities and researches. The scope of our article is to briefly highlight the importance of concrete actions aimed at informing and getting awareness of the environmental aspect in the consumption of natural resources, and also analyze the results of a research regarding the adult population perception of the methods developing ecological behaviour in consuming natural resources. A set of three hypotheses has been tested during the research using primary information obtained through a questionnairebased survey. The information has been processed using SPSS software. The results of our research outline the facts that the population of Bucharest is selective when choosing the information channels, that there is a low correlation between the civic expression and the individual behaviour due to an early development of the non-government organizations, the reduced civic involvement and the adverse accommodation of messages to target groups. Those who are interested in informing and developing the consumers’ ecological behaviour would rather need the support of fellow citizens than of the institutions authorized to promote such a message.ecological behaviour, consumer, natural resources, environment, information, Bucharest, concern

Preparation and characterization of biopolyol from liquefied oil palm fruit waste: part 2

Oil palm fruit waste (OPFW) was conducted using polyhydric alcohol (PA) as liquefaction solvent with H2SO4 in three different OPFW/PA ratio (1/2, 1/3 and 1/4). During the liquefaction, cellulose, semi-cellulose and lignin are decomposed, which results in changes of acid value and hydroxyl value. The liquefied OPFW were characterized by Fourier Transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The hydroxyl and acid values of the liquefied oil palm fruit waste (OPFW) varied with the liquefied conditions. It was observed that with an increase in the liquefaction solvent (PA) amount in the mixture resulted in a high acid value and hydroxyl value for the OPFW. FT-IR spectroscopy analysis showed that the resulting biopolyol was suitable monomer for polyurethane (PU) synthesis for the production of PU foams

Consensus Message Passing for Layered Graphical Models

Generative models provide a powerful framework for probabilistic reasoning. However, in many domains their use has been hampered by the practical difficulties of inference. This is particularly the case in computer vision, where models of the imaging process tend to be large, loopy and layered. For this reason bottom-up conditional models have traditionally dominated in such domains. We find that widely-used, general-purpose message passing inference algorithms such as Expectation Propagation (EP) and Variational Message Passing (VMP) fail on the simplest of vision models. With these models in mind, we introduce a modification to message passing that learns to exploit their layered structure by passing 'consensus' messages that guide inference towards good solutions. Experiments on a variety of problems show that the proposed technique leads to significantly more accurate inference results, not only when compared to standard EP and VMP, but also when compared to competitive bottom-up conditional models.Comment: Appearing in Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 201

Lessons Learned and Next Steps in Energy Efficiency Measurement and Attribution: Energy Savings, Net to Gross, Non-Energy Benefits, and Persistence of Energy Efficiency Behavior

This white paper examines four topics addressing evaluation, measurement, and attribution of direct and indirect effects to energy efficiency and behavioral programs: Estimates of program savings (gross); Net savings derivation through free ridership / net to gross analyses; Indirect non-energy benefits / impacts (e.g., comfort, convenience, emissions, jobs); and, Persistence of savings

How Green Public Procurement Contributes to Sustainable Development in China: Evidence from the IISD Green Public Procurement Model

The People's Republic of China spent more than CNY 1.6 trillion (USD 252 billion) on procurement in 2013, accounting for 11.7 per cent of all national spending (Ministry of Finance of the People's Republic of China, 2014). In light of these numbers, the potential environmental, social and economic multipliers of greening government purchases become evident. The benefits of a comprehensive and efficient green public procurement (GPP) policy are not limited to the green products and services the public sector buys, but will have a ripple effect that encourages green consumption nationwide. The significant purchasing power of the government will provide the much-needed incentives in order for businesses to invest and innovate in green products and services to meet the government's guaranteed long-term and high-volume demand. Additionally, GPP is in line with China's national plans to pioneer "eco-civilisation" and with the upcoming 13th Five-Year Plan (FYP), which underlines the importance of GPP.This paper is the second and final component of IISD's contribution to greening public procurement in China. Our discussion paper Green Public Procurement in China: Quantifying the Benefits, published in April 2015, analyzed China's GPP landscape, taking a closer look at current practices, actors at different levels of government and the underlying legal framework. In addition, the paper introduced the IISD GPP Model, discussing its potential for quantifying and communicating the benefits of GPP, while providing a high-level overview of the modelling approach used and of the scope of the model envisioned. Building on the results of the IISD GPP Model, consultations with stakeholders and an extensive literature review, this paper provides targeted recommendations addressing the development areas identified to improve GPP in China. The recommendations follow a multiphase approach offering more immediate solutions as well as more ambitious, larger-scale overhauls of the GPP framework for the long term. The results of the IISD GPP Model will be shared for the first time as part of this paper, making the case for green procurement through analyzing five product categories: air conditioners, lighting, cars, paper and cement. These categories were selected because they represent significant financial flows in procurement, have notable environmental impacts and domestic production, and have sufficient data available to facilitate their analysis. A detailed overview of the key elements of the modelling approach will be provided, in addition to an explanation of the model setup and the range of externalities monetised for each product category. Finally, we will look at how to use the model at the different levels of government as well as how its scope can be extended and customised in order to leverage its potential under a wider range of circumstances and areas of procurement