8,469 research outputs found
Financial Risk, Innovation and Alternative Pathways to Decarbonising the Energy System in 2050
There is a lot of forward looking work attempting to envisage the decarbonised energy system of the future as reflected with current interest in 'smart grids'. A central tenet behind most visions of the 'smart grids' of the future are the price signals that financial and commodity markets will deliver to facilitate effective and efficient resource allocation. Most of these visions take stylised and static views of financial and commodity markets despite the fact that these markets are experiencing dramatic change due to innovation and regulation. Accordingly, the paper maps the risks associated in the fusion of financial innovation with innovation in the energy system through a theoretical framework that draws on evolutionary models of paradigm shift. Risks to both the financial and energy systems are characterised as either emanating from primary or secondary markets and these are explored in terms of alternative visions of the energy system in the long run
On the Implementation of GNU Prolog
GNU Prolog is a general-purpose implementation of the Prolog language, which
distinguishes itself from most other systems by being, above all else, a
native-code compiler which produces standalone executables which don't rely on
any byte-code emulator or meta-interpreter. Other aspects which stand out
include the explicit organization of the Prolog system as a multipass compiler,
where intermediate representations are materialized, in Unix compiler
tradition. GNU Prolog also includes an extensible and high-performance finite
domain constraint solver, integrated with the Prolog language but implemented
using independent lower-level mechanisms. This article discusses the main
issues involved in designing and implementing GNU Prolog: requirements, system
organization, performance and portability issues as well as its position with
respect to other Prolog system implementations and the ISO standardization
initiative.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures, To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming (TPLP); Keywords: Prolog, logic programming system, GNU, ISO,
WAM, native code compilation, Finite Domain constraint
Parallel local search for solving Constraint Problems on the Cell Broadband Engine (Preliminary Results)
We explore the use of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE for short) for
combinatorial optimization applications: we present a parallel version of a
constraint-based local search algorithm that has been implemented on a
multiprocessor BladeCenter machine with twin Cell/BE processors (total of 16
SPUs per blade). This algorithm was chosen because it fits very well the
Cell/BE architecture and requires neither shared memory nor communication
between processors, while retaining a compact memory footprint. We study the
performance on several large optimization benchmarks and show that this
achieves mostly linear time speedups, even sometimes super-linear. This is
possible because the parallel implementation might explore simultaneously
different parts of the search space and therefore converge faster towards the
best sub-space and thus towards a solution. Besides getting speedups, the
resulting times exhibit a much smaller variance, which benefits applications
where a timely reply is critical
Percolation for the stable marriage of Poisson and Lebesgue with random appetites
Let be a set of centers chosen according to a Poisson point process in
. Consider the allocation of to which is
stable in the sense of the Gale-Shapley marriage problem, with the additional
feature that every center has a random appetite , where
is a nonnegative scale constant and is a nonnegative random
variable. Generalizing previous results by Freire, Popov and Vachkovskaia
(\cite{FPV}), we show the absence of percolation when is small enough,
depending on certain characteristics of the moment of .Comment: 12 pages. Final versio
Marmots do not consistently use their left eye to respond to an approaching threat but those that did fled sooner.
In many vertebrates, the brain's right hemisphere which is connected to the left visual field specializes in the processing of information about threats while the left hemisphere which is connected to the right visual field specializes in the processing of information about conspecifics. This is referred to as hemispheric lateralization. But individuals that are too predictable in their response to predators could have reduced survival and we may expect selection for somewhat unpredictable responses. We studied hemispheric lateralization in yellow-bellied marmots Marmota flaviventer, a social rodent that falls prey to a variety of terrestrial and aerial predators. We first asked if they have lateralized responses to a predatory threat. We then asked if the eye that they used to assess risk influenced their perceptions of risk. We recorded the direction marmots were initially looking and then walked toward them until they fled. We recorded the distance that they responded to our experimental approach by looking, the eye with which they looked at us, and the distance at which they fled (i.e., flight initiation distance; FID). We found that marmots had no eye preference with which they looked at an approaching threat. Furthermore, the population was not comprised of individuals that responded in consistent ways. However, we found that marmots that looked at the approaching person with their left eye had larger FIDs suggesting that risk assessment was influenced by the eye used to monitor the threat. These findings are consistent with selection to make prey less predictable for their predators, despite underlying lateralization
Topological Magnons and Edge States in Antiferromagnetic Skyrmion Crystals
Antiferromagnetic skyrmion crystals are magnetic phases predicted to exist in
antiferromagnets with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. Their spatially
periodic noncollinear magnetic texture gives rise to topological bulk magnon
bands characterized by nonzero Chern numbers. We find topologically-protected
chiral magnonic edge states over a wide range of magnetic fields and
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction values. Moreover, and of particular
importance for experimental realizations, edge states appear at the lowest
possible energies, namely, within the first bulk magnon gap. Thus,
antiferromagnetic skyrmion crystals show great promise as novel platforms for
topological magnonics.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Towards End-to-End Acoustic Localization using Deep Learning: from Audio Signal to Source Position Coordinates
This paper presents a novel approach for indoor acoustic source localization
using microphone arrays and based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The
proposed solution is, to the best of our knowledge, the first published work in
which the CNN is designed to directly estimate the three dimensional position
of an acoustic source, using the raw audio signal as the input information
avoiding the use of hand crafted audio features. Given the limited amount of
available localization data, we propose in this paper a training strategy based
on two steps. We first train our network using semi-synthetic data, generated
from close talk speech recordings, and where we simulate the time delays and
distortion suffered in the signal that propagates from the source to the array
of microphones. We then fine tune this network using a small amount of real
data. Our experimental results show that this strategy is able to produce
networks that significantly improve existing localization methods based on
\textit{SRP-PHAT} strategies. In addition, our experiments show that our CNN
method exhibits better resistance against varying gender of the speaker and
different window sizes compared with the other methods.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 8 table
Magnonic Quadrupole Topological Insulator in Antiskyrmion Crystals
When the crystalline symmetries that protect a higher-order topological phase
are not preserved at the boundaries of the sample, gapless hinge modes or
in-gap corner states cannot be stabilized. Therefore, careful engineering of
the sample termination is required. Similarly, magnetic textures, whose quantum
fluctuations determine the supported magnonic excitations, tend to relax to new
configurations that may also break crystalline symmetries when boundaries are
introduced. Here we uncover that antiskyrmion crystals provide an
experimentally accessible platform to realize a magnonic topological quadrupole
insulator, whose hallmark signature are robust magnonic corner states.
Furthermore, we show that tuning an applied magnetic field can trigger the
self-assembly of antiskyrmions carrying a fractional topological charge along
the sample edges. Crucially, these fractional antiskyrmions restore the
symmetries needed to enforce the emergence of the magnonic corner states. Using
the machinery of nested Wilson loops, adapted to magnonic systems supported by
noncollinear magnetic textures, we demonstrate the quantization of the bulk
quadrupole moment, edge dipole moments, and corner charges
Engineering proteins with 3D convolutional neural networks
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Architecture for transition: Analysis of two projects in the peace-building process in Colombia
Architecture for transition is a proposal of theoretical and methodological approach that takes up approaches
from the South epistemologies and critical design studies. Therefore, a conceptual debate on this perspective has the
purpose of contextualizing and localizing the analysis of two communitarian small infrastructure projects generated
within the framework of the peace-building process in Colombia. The evaluation of these projects implemented in the
rural area of San José del Guaviare from the perspective of architecture for transition evidences a technical logic that is
decontextualized, delocalized and dysfunctional in the conception and execution of the architectural design. This leads to
the conclusion that the approach proposed should be considered to achieve architectural projects that adapt to the
territorial conditions, respond to the inhabitants needs, strengthen community ties, and contribute to the construction of
peace
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