The Regional Data Platform: A Geospatial Solution that enhances Collaboration of Local and Regional Efforts to Tackle Pressing Issues

How do we address congested urban centers, pandemics, pollution, human-induced climate change, water crisis, racial inequities, affordable housing, severe drought, and other complex problems , as well as smaller interconnected ones like too many liquor stores in community?” These challenges threaten our collective future and require informed and thoughtful insights to properly tackle them. This paper introduces the Regional Data Platform (RDP), a geospatial solution for holistic planning across scales and jurisdictions to facilitate data collection, analyses, and informed decisions to address major problems, as well as day-to-day ones. The RDP utilizes “space” and “place” constructs through Geographic Information System (GIS) to enable a geographic approach and provide useful tools and its framework to collect, examine, and then recommend measures to mitigate and help resolve these major challenges (and not so major problems) that impact not only Southern California, but many parts of our world. For the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) region, this paper highlights the symbiotic relationship between local and regional planning, and the role of better data, tools, and government-to-government collaboration in addressing complicated problems and smaller ones under a common vision

Strategic development in the petrochemical industry

Imperial Users onl

New formats for computing with real-numbers under round-to-nearest

An edited version of this work was accepted in IEEE Transactions on computers, DOI 10.1109/TC.2015.2479623In this paper, a new family of formats to deal with real number for applications requiring round to nearest is proposed. They are based on shifting the set of exactly represented numbers which are used in conventional radix-R number systems. This technique allows performing radix complement and round to nearest without carry propagation with negligible time and hardware cost. Furthermore, the proposed formats have the same storage cost and precision as standard ones. Since conversion to conventional formats simply require appending one extra-digit to the operands, standard circuits may be used to perform arithmetic operations with operands under the new format. We also extend the features of the RN-representation system and carry out a thorough comparison between both representation systems. We conclude that the proposed representation system is generally more adequate to implement systems for computation with real number under round-to-nearest.Ministry of Education and Science of Spain under contracts TIN2013-42253-P

Improving Fixed-Point Implementation of QR Decomposition by Rounding-to-Nearest

QR decomposition is a key operation in many current communication systems. This paper shows how to reduce the area of a fixed-point QR decomposition implementation based on Givens rotations by using a new number representation system. This new representation allows performing round-tonearest at the same cost of truncation. Consequently, the rounding errors of the results are halved, which allows it to reduce the word-length by one bit. This reduction positively impacts on the area, delay and power consumption of the design.Ministry of Education and Science of Spain and Junta of Andalucía under contracts TIN2013-42253-P and TIC-1692, respectively, and Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Project based learning on industrial informatics: applying IoT to urban garden

Copyright (c) 2018 IEEEThe fast evolution of technologies forces teachers to trade content off for self-learning. PBL is one of the best ways to promote self-learning and simultaneously boost motivation. In this paper, we present our experience introducing project-based learning in the last year subject. New Internet of Things (IoT) topic allows us to carry out complete projects, integrating different technologies and tools. Moreover, the selection of open-source and standard free technologies makes easy and cheap the access to hardware and software platforms used. We carefully have picked communication, data management, and programming tools that we think would be attractive to our students. They can start making fast prototyping with little initial skills and, at the same time, these are serious and popular tools widely used in the industry. In this paper, we report on the design of a project-based learning for our course and the impact this has on the student satisfaction and motivation. Surveys taught us that tuning the courses towards developing real projects on the field, has a large impact on acceptance, learning objectives achievements and motivation towards the course content.”I Plan Propio Integral de Docencia de la Universidad de Málaga” y Proyecto de Innovación Educativa PIE17/085, de la Universidad de Málaga. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Measuring Improvement when Using HUB Formats to Implement Floating-Point Systems under Round-to-Nearest

MEC bajo TIN2013-42253-PThis paper analyzes the benefits of using HUB formats to implement floating-point arithmetic under round-tonearest mode from a quantitative point of view. Using HUB formats to represent numbers allows the removal of the rounding logic of arithmetic units, including sticky-bit computation. This is shown for floating-point adders, multipliers, and converters. Experimental analysis demonstrates that HUB formats and the corresponding arithmetic units maintain the same accuracy as conventional ones. On the other hand, the implementation of these units, based on basic architectures, shows that HUB formats simultaneously improve area, speed, and power consumption. Specifically, based on data obtained from the synthesis, a HUB single-precision adder is about 14% faster but consumes 38% less area and 26% less power than the conventional adder. Similarly, a HUB single-precision multiplier is 17% faster, uses 22% less area, and consumes slightly less power than conventional multiplier. At the same speed, the adder and multiplier achieve area and power reductions of up to 50% and 40%, respectively

Floating Point Square Root under HUB Format

Unit-Biased (HUB) is an emerging format based on shifting the representation line of the binary numbers by half unit in the last place. The HUB format is specially relevant for computers where rounding to nearest is required because it is performed simply by truncation. From a hardware point of view, the circuits implementing this representation save both area and time since rounding does not involve any carry propagation. Designs to perform the four basic operations have been proposed under HUB format recently. Nevertheless, the square root operation has not been confronted yet. In this paper we present an architecture to carry out the square root operation under HUB format for floating point numbers. The results of this work keep supporting the fact that the HUB representation involves simpler hardware than its conventional counterpart for computers requiring round-to-nearest mode.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Simplified Floating-Point Units for High Dynamic Range Image and Video Systems

The upcoming arrival of high dynamic range image and video applications to consumer electronics will force the utilization of floating-point numbers on them. This paper shows that introducing a slight modification on classical floating-point number systems, the implementation of those circuits can be highly improved. For a 16-bit numbers, by using the proposed format, the area and power consumption of a floating-point adder is reduced up to 70% whereas those parameters are maintained for the case of a multiplier.This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain and Junta of Andalucía under contracts TIN2013-42253-P and TIC-1692, respectively, and Universidad de Málaga.Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Normalizing or not normalizing? An open question for floating-point arithmetic in embedded systems

Emerging embedded applications lack of a specific standard when they require floating-point arithmetic. In this situation they use the IEEE-754 standard or ad hoc variations of it. However, this standard was not designed for this purpose. This paper aims to open a debate to define a new extension of the standard to cover embedded applications. In this work, we only focus on the impact of not performing normalization. We show how eliminating the condition of normalized numbers, implementation costs can be dramatically reduced, at the expense of a moderate loss of accuracy. Several architectures to implement addition and multiplication for non-normalized numbers are proposed and analyzed. We show that a combined architecture (adder-multiplier) can halve the area and power consumption of its counterpart IEEE-754 architecture. This saving comes at the cost of reducing an average of about 10 dBs the Signal-to-Noise Ratio for the tested algorithms. We think these results should encourage researchers to perform further investigation in this issue.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

VCD helps others in molecular aggregates

Molecular self-assembly is the driving force of a great number of physical, chemical and biological processes in Nature.1 The properties of the molecular aggregates are markedly dependent on the intermolecular forces which hold together the building blocks, but also on the chemical and structural features of these building blocks. The transference of properties from the individual molecules to the bulk aggregate can be summarized in three main behaviours: disappearance (dipole moment), direct sum (weight) and enhancement (resilience). A nice example of the last group is the optical activity. The presence of a chiral seed in the molecules modulates their folding by favouring one among the available macrostructures. As a consequence, new forms of supramolecular chirality are triggered, such as helical, spiral or chiral sheets, which usually give rise to a noticeable increasing of the chiral signal of the aggregates. Vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) is the chiral version of infrared spectroscopy. It combines the intramolecular view provided by the molecular vibrations with the selective capability of a chiral analysis. It is also a suitable technique to observe the aggregation-induced signal enhancement in any type of condensed phase (solid, liquid, gel, etc). Here we present a series of studies on supramolecular systems, Figure 1, in which VCD helps and improves the analysis obtained by other techniques of chiral analysis as electron microscopy (SEM, AFM), electronic circular dichroism (ECD), Raman optical activity (ROA) or circularly polarized luminescence (CPL). These studies are aimed to obtain structural information of the macromolecular scaffolding useful to control the features and applications of the aggregates.Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec