2,348 research outputs found

    A network-aware framework for energy-efficient data acquisition in wireless sensor networks

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    Wireless sensor networks enable users to monitor the physical world at an extremely high fidelity. In order to collect the data generated by these tiny-scale devices, the data management community has proposed the utilization of declarative data-acquisition frameworks. While these frameworks have facilitated the energy-efficient retrieval of data from the physical environment, they were agnostic of the underlying network topology and also did not support advanced query processing semantics. In this paper we present KSpot+, a distributed network-aware framework that optimizes network efficiency by combining three components: (i) the tree balancing module, which balances the workload of each sensor node by constructing efficient network topologies; (ii) the workload balancing module, which minimizes data reception inefficiencies by synchronizing the sensor network activity intervals; and (iii) the query processing module, which supports advanced query processing semantics. In order to validate the efficiency of our approach, we have developed a prototype implementation of KSpot+ in nesC and JAVA. In our experimental evaluation, we thoroughly assess the performance of KSpot+ using real datasets and show that KSpot+ provides significant energy reductions under a variety of conditions, thus significantly prolonging the longevity of a WSN

    Research Report 2007-2008

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    Introduction From the Chairperson Astronomy Atomic Physics Condensed Matter Physics Nuclear Physics Physics Education Publications Dissertations Presentations Proposals and Grants Scholarly Activity Personne

    Studying a Self-Sustainable System by Making a Mind Time Machine

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    Abstract We present our pilot study on a special machine that selfsustains its rich dynamics in an open environment. We made a machine called "MTM" (Mind Time Machine) that runs all day long, receiving massive visual data from the environment, processing by an internal neural dynamics with a learning capability, and showing sustainable complex adaptive dynamics. The System's internal time structure is also self-organized as a result of coupling with the environment. By observing MTM over 2 and half months, we argue for the possibility of machine consciousness in an artificial system. Keywords mind time, massive data, plasticity, sustainability Robustness and system design It is time for bringing artificial life in silicon into the real world. In contrast to the artificially simulated environment, the real world presents many unexpected complex encounters, and living systems are essentially adaptive to these real world complexities. In this pilot study, we designed an artificial system that can be a first test system for overcoming various problems for artificial systems to "survive" in an open ended environment. We required that any artificial life should simultaneously cope with various kinds of sensory flows while simultaneously maintaining its own identity and autonomy over a relatively long period of time. In creating such a machine, our main concern is how to design a system's time structure. A human has subjective time structures which is different from objective time. Our hypothesis is that this should be true for all intenPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) 2010 September 27-28, 2010, The University of Tokyo, Japan Copyright c 2010 ACM 978-1-4503-0491-7/10/09. . . $10.00 tional/functional systems, whether natural or artificial. Objective time structures, i.e. the physical Newtonian time scale, can be measured by a mechanical clock, but our mind's time scale, the so-called Bergsonian time scale, may not be treated the same way. That is, a minimal-length time segment can be regarded as infinitesimally small in the case of Newtonian time, but in Bergsonian time it can be bounded. I submit that there is no continuous time flow which can be assumed, as it is always perturbed by the inflow from an open-ended environment. Wiener's definition of Bergsonian time, as opposed to Newtonian time (chapter 1 in Some authors In our case, a novel biochemical experiment together with simulation and robotics approaches are being used to develop an in-depth understanding of robustness and how we may quantify and examine its effects 1 We define robustness of the droplets with respect to their ability to sustain self-moving behavior. In contrast, if we pick an example from the game of Life, gliders (the simplest moving pattern in the game) appear to display self-moving behavior but do not actually function in this way. This evolution of self-movement, autonomy and individuality appears to be a key prerequisite for developing robust behaviors. Using a robotic platform, we used pure Hebbian learning dynamics to show how auditory and visual modules cooperatively work together to self-organize robust goaloriented behavior By increasing our understanding of how we can connect artificial systems with natural environments, we can further our development of a theoretical framework that provides a background of assumptions to inform our robotic and simulated models. One of my proposals is the Maximal Design Principle Concerning the above robustness issue, we designed a machine called MTM (Mind Time Machine). In order to take into account the system's internal time structure, Benjamin Libet's neuro-physiological early experiments In our pilot work, the system receives and edits the video inputs, while it self-organizes the momentary "now," in agreement with Libet's arguments. Its core program is a neural network that includes chaos (a mechanism that expands the small difference) inside the system, and a metanetwork that consists of neural networks. Using this system as a hardware, and chaotic itinerancy In section 2, we illustrate the architecture of MTM explaining the underlying neural dynamics. In section 3, we report how MTM behaves over 2.5 months and show some characterization of the behaviors-its temporal complexity and dynamics of the internal clock. In section 4, we briefly describe how a sound version of MTM might function, and report on the pilot study of it. In section 5, we discuss how a system's sustainability is restored by the asynchronous memory updating and sensory networks. We then return to the Bergsonian vs. Newtonian time scale issue

    PICES Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2017

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    2017 Inter-sessional Science Board Meeting (pp. 1-4); Highlights from the FUTURE SSC’s 3rd Inter-sessional Meeting (pp. 5-6); WG 35 (WG-NPESR3) meets inter-sessionally in Honolulu (pp. 7-8); PICES/ICES International Symposium on “Drivers of dynamics of small pelagic fish resources” (pp. 9-12); SPF Workshop on “Environmental control of spatio-temporal changes in population size, distribution and migration of small pelagic fish in an ecosystem context” (pp. 13-15); SPF Workshop on “Methods and techniques for sampling and assessing small pelagic fish populations” (16-17); SPF Workshop on “Modeling migratory fish behavior and distribution” (pp. 18-19); SPF Workshop on “Recent advances in the life stage ecophysiology of small pelagic fish” (pp. 20-21); SPF Workshop on “Remote sensing and ecology of small pelagics” (pp. 22-23); SPF Workshop on “Simulation approaches of forage fish populations for management strategy evaluations” (pp. 24-26); An ICES/PICES Workshop on “Understanding the impacts and consequences of ocean acidification for commercial species and end-users” (pp. 27-28); The 26th International Hydrological Program (IHP) training course on “Coastal vulnerability and freshwater discharge” (pp. 29-30); PICES/MAFF MarWeb project collaborates with the United Nations program on the development of Marine Protected Areas in Guatemala (pp. 31-34); Program of topic sessions and workshops at PICES-2017 (pp. 35-35); The 3rd PICES/ICES Early Career Scientist Conference takes place in Busan, Korea (pp. 36-39); The Bering Sea: Current status and recent trends (pp. 40-42); The state of the western North Pacific during the 2016 warm season (pp. 43-44

    GEOPOLITICS OF THE 2016 AUSTRALIAN DEFENSE WHITE PAPER AND ITS PREDECESSORS

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    Australia released the newest edition of its Defense White Paper, describing Canberra’s current and emerging national security priorities, on February 25, 2016. This continues a tradition of issuing defense white papers since 1976. This work will examine and analyze the contents of this document as well as previous Australian defense white papers, scholarly literature, and political statements assessing their geopolitical significance. It will also examine public input into Australian defense white papers and the emerging role of social media in this public involvement. It concludes by evaluating whether Australia has the political will and economic resources necessary to fulfill its geopolitical and national security aspirations

    North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES): Annual Report, Seventeenth Meeting, Dalian, China, October 24 - November 2, 2008

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    Report of Opening Session. Report of Governing Council. Report of the Finance and Administration Committee. Reports of Science Board and Committees. Report of the Climate Change and Carrying Capacity Scientific Program. Reports of Expert Groups. Session Summaries. Participants. PICES Members. PICES Acronyms

    The Sanitation Triangle

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    This open access book deals with global sanitation, where SDG 6.2 sets a target of enabling access to sanitation services for all, but has not yet been achieved in low- and middle-income countries. The transition from the United Nations MDGs to the SDGs requires more consideration based on the socio-cultural aspects of global sanitation. In other words, equitable sanitation for those in vulnerable situations could be based on socio-cultural contexts. Sanitation is a system that comprises not only a latrine but also the works for the treatment and disposal of human waste. Sanitation systems do not function by themselves but have significance only through social management. The process of decision-making also largely depends on socio-cultural conditions, and the importance of sanitation needs to be socially acknowledged. The health benefits of sanitation improvement—among the significant contributions of sanitation—also need to be considered in the socio-cultural milieu. Further, the social-culture itself is affected, and potentially even created, by sanitation. In this context, more progress on the improvement of sanitation requires a more holistic approach across disciplines. In this book, we present the concept of the Sanitation Triangle, which considers the interconnections of health, materials, and socio-culture in sanitation, as a holistic approach, and the case studies based on the Sanitation Triangle by diverse disciplines such as Cultural Anthropology, Development Studies, Health Sciences, Engineering, and Science Communication. By the deep theoretical examinations and inter-dialogues between the different disciplines, this book explores the potentialities of inter-disciplinary studies on global sanitation

    Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

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    22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3

    Identification of social relation within pedestrian dyads

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    This study focuses on social pedestrian groups in public spaces and makes an effort to identify the type of social relation between the group members. As a first step for this identification problem, we focus on dyads (i.e. 2 people groups). Moreover, as a mutually exclusive categorization of social relations, we consider the domain-based approach of Bugental, which precisely corresponds to social relations of colleagues, couples, friends and families, and identify each dyad with one of those relations. For this purpose, we use anonymized trajectory data and derive a set of observables thereof, namely, inter-personal distance, group velocity, velocity difference and height difference. Subsequently, we use the probability density functions (pdf) of these observables as a tool to understand the nature of the relation between pedestrians. To that end, we propose different ways of using the pdfs. Namely, we introduce a probabilistic Bayesian approach and contrast it to a functional metric one and evaluate the performance of both methods with appropriate assessment measures. This study stands out as the first attempt to automatically recognize social relation between pedestrian groups. Additionally, in doing that it uses completely anonymous data and proves that social relation is still possible to recognize with a good accuracy without invading privacy. In particular, our findings indicate that significant recognition rates can be attained for certain categories and with certain methods. Specifically, we show that a very good recognition rate is achieved in distinguishing colleagues from leisure-oriented dyads (families, couples and friends), whereas the distinction between the leisure-oriented dyads results to be inherently harder, but still possible at reasonable rates, in particular if families are restricted to parent-child groups. In general, we establish that the Bayesian method outperforms the functional metric one due, probably, to the difficulty of the latter to learn observable pdfs from individual trajectories

    Annual report 2007 - North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES). Sixteenth meeting, Victoria, Canada, October 26-November 5, 2007

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    Report of Opening Session (p. 1). Report of Governing Council (p. 15). Report of the Finance and Administration Committee (p. 65). Reports of Science Board and Committees: Science Board Inter-Sessional Meeting (p. 83); Science Board (p. 93); Biological Oceanography Committee (p. 105); Fishery Science Committee (p. 117); Marine Environmental Quality Committee (p. 129); Physical Oceanography and Climate Committee (p. 139); Technical Committee on Data Exchange (p. 145); Technical Committee on Monitoring (p. 153). Reports of Sections, Working and Study Groups: Section on Carbon and Climate (p. 161); Section on Ecology of Harmful Algal Blooms in the North Pacific (p. 167); Working Group 19 on Ecosystem-based Management Science and its Application to the North Pacific (p. 173); Working Group 20 on Evaluations of Climate Change Projections (p. 179); Working Group 21 on Non-indigenous Aquatic Species (p. 183); Study Group to Develop a Strategy for GOOS (p. 193); Study Group on Ecosystem Status Reporting (p. 203); Study Group on Marine Aquaculture and Ranching in the PICES Region (p. 213); Study Group on Scientific Cooperation between PICES and Non-member Countries (p. 225). Reports of the Climate Change and Carrying Capacity Program: Implementation Panel on the CCCC Program (p. 229); CFAME Task Team (p. 235); MODEL Task Team (p. 241). Reports of Advisory Panels: Advisory Panel for a CREAMS/PICES Program in East Asian Marginal Seas (p. 249); Advisory Panel on Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey in the North Pacific (p. 253); Advisory Panel on Iron Fertilization Experiment in the Subarctic Pacific Ocean (p. 255); Advisory Panel on Marine Birds and Mammals (p. 261); Advisory Panel on Micronekton Sampling Inter-calibration Experiment (p. 265). 2007 Review of PICES Publication Program (p. 269). Guidelines for PICES Temporary Expert Groups (p. 297). Summary of Scientific Sessions and Workshops (p. 313). Report of the ICES/PICES Conference for Early Career Scientists (p. 355). Membership (p. 367). Participants (p. 387). PICES Acronyms (p. 413). Acronyms (p. 415)
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