Intelligent Behavior of Autonomous Vehicles in Outdoor Environment

The objective of this PhD-project has been to develop and enhance the operational behaviour of autonomous or automated conventional machines under out-door conditions. This has included developing high-level planning measures for the maximisation of machine productivity as an important element in the continued efforts of planning and controlling resource inputs in both arable and high value crops farming. The methods developed generate the optimized coverage path for any field regardless of its complexity on 2D or 3D terrains without any human intervention and in a manner that minimizes operational time, skipped and overlapped areas, and fuel consumption. By applying the developed approaches, a reduction of more than 20% in consumed fossil fuel together with a corresponding reduction in the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouses is achievable.In this work, a software package for the autonomous navigation of field robotics over 2D and 3D field terrains and the optimization of field operations and machinery systems have been developed. A web-based version of the developed software package is currently under progress

The analysis of embankment dams by nonlinear finite element method

Imperial Users onl

Inspire to Aspire: The Fate of Possibilities

Essay written for the James Rhio O\u27Connor Scholarship competition

Road freight privatisation in Egypt : a comparative analysis with Great Britain and Hungary

Egypt, along with other countries in the world, is going through an economic transition from state control to a more market orientated economy. As part of this process, road freight transport is undergoing a process of privatisation and deregulation. There are many possible approaches which can be adopted, depending somewhat on the desired outcome of the process and economic philosophy of the country. Many countries have already gone through the processes of road freight privatisation and deregulation; some much more recently (Hungary) than others (the UK). At this early stage of road freight privatisation in Egypt, it is important and valuable to the policy maker to identify alternatives available for the privatisation process, problems it may be facing, as well as its impact on the road freight industry. Using a qualitative approach, this research attempts to explore the issues relating to privatisation of the road freight industry in Egypt, in terms of; the impact of privatisation, the role of freight management, the best method of privatisation, problems facing privatisation of the road freight industry, and finally treatment of external costs under privatisation. The overall objective of the research is to investigate and analyze the structure of the road freight industry, its cost, and how privatisation of the industry is approached under three different regulatory systems (the UK, Egypt, and Hungary). This should prove of value to countries in a transitional stage towards deregulation and privatisation and, in particular, to Egypt. The literature review is used to develop a conceptual model relating to economies in transition. This is then transformed into an operational model using the Delphi technique. The Delphi survey took place in both Egypt and Hungary, with panels comprising; academics, operators, and governmental officials. The results of the survey show that, unlike Hungary, there is no lack of available capital to achieve privatisation of road freight in Egypt, and that awareness of the road freight external cost is higher in Hungary than in Egypt. But in both countries the resulting increase in unemployment is one of the most important problem to face privatisation of road freight.the British Counci

Popular Discontent, Revolution, and Democratization in Egypt in a Globalizing World

This paper examines how informal, discontent actors in Egypt have evolved in a globalizing world and their role in the January 25th revolution. It focuses on the effects of the deteriorating economic and social conditions in Egypt related to the former regime\u27s policy and the role of mass media, information, and communication technologies in facilitating mobilization, recruitment, and eventually the popular uprising. This paper also discusses the issue of how informal discontent protesters and groups formulate their goals and organize themselves to exert pressure on formal institutions of the state. The main conclusion is that informal actors have not yet managed to develop a shared political agenda with a focus on democratic transition in Egypt and have instead regressed to their own goals and agendas. In light of current political polarization, this paper concludes that there is a need to form a historical block on the basis of democracy or a national-unity government to be able to set priorities and build the desired democratic system

Sentence Alignment using MR and GA

In this paper, two new approaches to align English-Arabic sentences in bilingual parallel corpora based on mathematical regression (MR) and genetic algorithm (GA) classifiers are presented. A feature vector is extracted from the text pair under consideration. This vector contains text features such as length, punctuation score, and cognate score values. A set of manually prepared training data was assigned to train the mathematical regression and genetic algorithm models. Another set of data was used for testing. The results of (MR) and (GA) outperform the results of length based approach. Moreover these new approaches are valid for any languages pair and are quite flexible since the feature vector may contain more, less or different features, such as a lexical matching feature and Hanzi characters in Japanese-Chinese texts, than the ones used in the current research

Ultrafast Electron Diffraction Study of the Dynamics of Antimony Thin Films and Nanoparticles

The ultrafast fast phenomena that take place following the application of a 120 fs laser pulse on 20 nm antimony thin films and 40 nm nanoparticles were studied using time-resolved electron diffraction. Samples are prepared by thermal evaporation, at small thickness (\u3c 10 nm) antimony nanoparticles form while at larger thicknesses we get continuous thin films. The samples are annealed and studied by static heating to determine their Debye temperatures, which were considerably less than the standard value. The thermal expansion under static heating also yielded the expansion coefficient of the sample material. Nanoparticle samples gave a very accurate thermal expansion coefficient (11 × 10-6 K-1). Ultrafast time resolved electron diffraction studies with ∼1.5 ps resolution are performed for both kinds of samples to determine the lattice thermalization time and study the difference in relaxation time between the thin films and nanoparticles. Knowing the Debye temperature from the static heating experiment (144 K for nanoparticles and 148 K for 20 nm thin films), we could measure the temperature rise due to the laser pulse. The thermal pressure and acoustic lattice oscillations are also studied. There was a noticeable delay of 6 ps between the onset of the drop of intensity and the onset of the drop in diffraction ring size, which indicates the propagation of a thermal stress front in the film

The Changes in the Arab Policy of Turkey from 2002-2010 : With a special reference to the Turkish Policy towards Syria

After long decades of estrangement since the establishment of the republic, the Arab policy of the AK party manifested visible changes that broke up with the state establishment mindset by underlining a sort of rapprochement on the regional level. This study aims to identify and understand the political and economic aspects of the Turkish policy towards Arab countries by according specific attention to Syria that constitutes for the current Turkish leadership a prototype for the Turkish policy towards its neighbors notably Arab countries. By taking account of the context within which these changes in the policy formulation occurred, the power structure model presents the analytical tool that enabled this study to explain how the new elitist configuration that was bourgeoning since the 80\u27s in the Turkish society reconsidered the formulation of the Turkish foreign policy tenets in light of the domestic and international conditions. In addition to the various literature dealing with the ruling elite socioeconomic structure and their evolution on the political scene in Turkey, the contributions provided by various respondents, addressed by a questionnaire, from the ruling party, the opposition, academic scholars and journalists about the current elite\u27s cognitive map in terms of perceiving Arabs and addressing them highlighted different reasons for the changes in the Turkish Arab policy. By relying on the literature and the respondents\u27 reactions, the Arab policy of Turkey since 2002 seemed to be controversial since it not only concretizes Turkey\u27s national interests but also contributes to the empowerment of the its role as a regional actor that seeks a permanent presence and influence on the international level