Estimated Lives Saved by Recently Implemented Vehicle Safety Standards in India: Implications and Future Safety Needs

India recently mandated several vehicle safety standards. The objective of this study was to estimate the share of lives saved in different types of road users that will be saved by these standards when they take full effect and to identify and analyse India’s future road traffic fatalities. We followed the residual crash analysis approach. Explicit deterministic rules were created for each standard, providing two estimates (one conservative, one optimistic) about which types of crashes would no longer lead to fatalities. The rules were applied to the historical in-depth crash database Road Accident Sampling System India (RASSI). While the recently introduced safety standards will undoubtedly save lives in India, we estimated that they are not sufficient to ensure the 50% reduction in road traffic fatalities that India has committed to by 2030. Our estimates of future crashes call for increased attention to fatal crashes involving PTW riders and pedestrians, either through safety standards or other means

Characterizing future crashes on Indian roads using counterfactual simulations of pre-crash vehicle safety technologies

India\u27s national road crash statistics indicate a continuing increase in casualties. Pre-crash safety technologies are effective in high-income countries, but it is unclear how these will perform in India and which crash types will remain after their implementation. The study objective was to predict and characterize the crashes resulting in moderate or more-severe injuries (Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale 2 or above: MAIS2+) that remain on Indian roads after 22 pre-crash safety technologies have been implemented in all cars, heavy vehicles (buses and trucks), and Powered Two-Wheelers (PTW). Two deterministic rulesets (one optimistic and one conservative) were modeled for each of the pre-crash safety technologies. Each rule was designed and tuned to the functionality of one technology. The data were obtained from the Road Accident Sampling System India (RASSI) database. In addition to the effectiveness of each technology alone, the combined effectiveness of all technologies was estimated. Further, the characteristics of those crashes that none of the technologies would have avoided were determined. Rear-end-specific Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB REAR-END) and Electronic Stability Control (ESC) installed in cars and heavy vehicles reduced MAIS2+ crashes the most. Crashes between PTWs and cars were significantly reduced by a rear-end-specific AEB installed in the cars. A pedestrian-specific AEB (AEB-PED) in cars and heavy vehicles was also shown to be effective. The only pre-crash safety technology in PTWs that was included, Antilock Braking Systems (ABS), reduced overall PTW crash involvement, but only reduced PTW-to-pedestrian crashes marginally. The largest proportion of remaining crashes were those that involved PTWs, indicating that PTW safety will remain a concern in future

FuSSI-Net: Fusion of Spatio-temporal Skeletons for Intention Prediction Network

Pedestrian intention recognition is very important to develop robust and safe autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) functionalities for urban driving. In this work, we develop an end-to-end pedestrian intention framework that performs well on day- and night- time scenarios. Our framework relies on objection detection bounding boxes combined with skeletal features of human pose. We study early, late, and combined (early and late) fusion mechanisms to exploit the skeletal features and reduce false positives as well to improve the intention prediction performance. The early fusion mechanism results in AP of 0.89 and precision/recall of 0.79/0.89 for pedestrian intention classification. Furthermore, we propose three new metrics to properly evaluate the pedestrian intention systems. Under these new evaluation metrics for the intention prediction, the proposed end-to-end network offers accurate pedestrian intention up to half a second ahead of the actual risky maneuver.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, IEEE Asilomar SS

Evolution of the Dust Coma in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Before 2009 Perihelion

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is the main target of ESA's Rosetta mission and will be encountered in May 2014. As the spacecraft shall be in orbit the comet nucleus before and after release of the lander {\it Philae}, it is necessary necessary to know the conditions in the coma. Study the dust environment, including the dust production rate and its variations along its preperihelion orbit. The comet was observed during its approach to the Sun on four epochs between early-June 2008 and mid-January 2009, over a large range of heliocentric distances that will be covered by the mission in 2014. An anomalous enhancement of the coma dust density was measured towards the comet nucleus. The scalelength of this enhancement increased with decreasing heliocentric distance of the comet. This is interpreted as a result of an unusually slow expansion of the dust coma. Assuming a spherical symmetric coma, the average amount of dust as well as its ejection velocity have been derived. The latter increases exponentially with decreasing heliocentric distance (\rh), ranging from about 1 m/s at 3 AU to about 25-35 m/s at 1.4 AU. Based on these results we describe the dust environment at those nucleocentric distances at which the spacecraft will presumably be in orbit. Astronomy and Astrophysics, in pressComment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Co-firing of biomass and other wastes in fluidised bed systems

A project on co-firing in large-scale power plants burning coal is currently funded by the European Commission. It is called COPOWER. The project involves 10 organisations from 6 countries. The project involves combustion studies over the full spectrum of equipment size, ranging from small laboratory-scale reactors and pilot plants, to investigate fundamentals and operating parameters, to proving trials on a commercial power plant in Duisburg. The power plant uses a circulating fluidized bed boiler. The results to be obtained are to be compared as function of scale-up. There are two different coals, 3 types of biomass and 2 kinds of waste materials are to be used for blending with coal for co-firing tests. The baseline values are obtained during a campaign of one month at the power station and the results are used for comparison with those to be obtained in other units of various sizes. Future tests will be implemented with the objective to achieve improvement on baseline values. The fuels to be used are already characterized. There are ongoing studies to determine reactivities of fuels and chars produced from the fuels. Reactivities are determined not only for individual fuels but also for blends to be used. Presently pilot-scale combustion tests are also undertaken to study the effect of blending coal with different types of biomass and waste materials. The potential for synergy to improve combustion is investigated. Early results will be reported in the Conference. Simultaneously, studies to verify the availability of biomass and waste materials in Portugal, Turkey and Italy have been undertaken. Techno-economic barriers for the future use of biomass and other waste materials are identified. The potential of using these materials in coal fired power stations has been assessed. The conclusions will also be reported

Shape modeling technique KOALA validated by ESA Rosetta at (21) Lutetia

We present a comparison of our results from ground-based observations of asteroid (21) Lutetia with imaging data acquired during the flyby of the asteroid by the ESA Rosetta mission. This flyby provided a unique opportunity to evaluate and calibrate our method of determination of size, 3-D shape, and spin of an asteroid from ground-based observations. We present our 3-D shape-modeling technique KOALA which is based on multi-dataset inversion. We compare the results we obtained with KOALA, prior to the flyby, on asteroid (21) Lutetia with the high-spatial resolution images of the asteroid taken with the OSIRIS camera on-board the ESA Rosetta spacecraft, during its encounter with Lutetia. The spin axis determined with KOALA was found to be accurate to within two degrees, while the KOALA diameter determinations were within 2% of the Rosetta-derived values. The 3-D shape of the KOALA model is also confirmed by the spectacular visual agreement between both 3-D shape models (KOALA pre- and OSIRIS post-flyby). We found a typical deviation of only 2 km at local scales between the profiles from KOALA predictions and OSIRIS images, resulting in a volume uncertainty provided by KOALA better than 10%. Radiometric techniques for the interpretation of thermal infrared data also benefit greatly from the KOALA shape model: the absolute size and geometric albedo can be derived with high accuracy, and thermal properties, for example the thermal inertia, can be determined unambiguously. We consider this to be a validation of the KOALA method. Because space exploration will remain limited to only a few objects, KOALA stands as a powerful technique to study a much larger set of small bodies using Earth-based observations.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in P&S

Producing Enactable Protocols in Artificial Agent Societies

This paper draws upon our previous work [7, 16] in which we proposed the organisation of services around the concept of artificial agent societies and presented a framework for representing roles and protocols using LTSs. The agent would apply for a role in the society, which would result in its participation in a number of protocols. We advocated the use of the games-based metaphor for describing the protocols and presented a framework for assessing the admission of the agent to the society on the basis of its competence. In this work we look at the subsequent question: what information should the agent receive upon entry?. We can not provide it with the full protocol because of security and overload issues. Therefore, we choose to only provide the actions pertinent to the protocols that the role the agent applied for participates in the society. We employ branching bisimulation for producing a protocol equivalent to the original one with all actions not involving the role translated into silent (τ) actions. However, this approach sometimes results in non-enactable protocols. In this case, we need to repair the protocol by adding the role in question as a recipient to certain protocol messages that were causing the problems. We present three different approaches for repairing protocols, depending on the number of messages from the original protocol they modify. The modified protocol is adopted as the final one and the agent is given the role automaton that is derived from the branching bisimulation process

Photometric observations of distant active comets

We present CCD VR_C observations of 6 distant comets located at heliocentric distances of 3.4--7.2 AU. Time-series data were obtained on three nights in July, 2000 covering 16 hours. Each comet was observed after the perihelion, when a lower activity was expected. Contrary to expectation, we found well-defined circular comae and extended tails visible out to a few (3-5) arcminutes. We detected a quasi-cyclic light variation of C/1999 J2, while C/1999 N4 showed some hints of a more complex variation. C/2000 K1 was constant to +/-0.04 mag during the observing run. The standard V and R_C data were used to estimate nuclear diameters, while the colour indices implied a slighly reddish (V-R=0.68, C/2000 K1), a neutral (V-R=0.47, C/1999 N4) and a slightly bluish (V-R=0.25, C/1999 J2) coma. Simple fits of the surface brightness distributions are also presented enabling order of magnitude estimates of nuclear radii. Beside the time-series observations, further single-shot observations of three faint comets are briefly described.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Small intestinal CD103+ dendritic cells display unique functional properties that are conserved between mice and humans

A functionally distinct subset of CD103+ dendritic cells (DCs) has recently been identified in murine mesenteric lymph nodes (MLN) that induces enhanced FoxP3+ T cell differentiation, retinoic acid receptor signaling, and gut-homing receptor (CCR9 and α4β7) expression in responding T cells. We show that this function is specific to small intestinal lamina propria (SI-LP) and MLN CD103+ DCs. CD103+ SI-LP DCs appeared to derive from circulating DC precursors that continually seed the SI-LP. BrdU pulse-chase experiments suggested that most CD103+ DCs do not derive from a CD103− SI-LP DC intermediate. The majority of CD103+ MLN DCs appear to represent a tissue-derived migratory population that plays a central role in presenting orally derived soluble antigen to CD8+ and CD4+ T cells. In contrast, most CD103− MLN DCs appear to derive from blood precursors, and these cells could proliferate within the MLN and present systemic soluble antigen. Critically, CD103+ DCs with similar phenotype and functional properties were present in human MLN, and their selective ability to induce CCR9 was maintained by CD103+ MLN DCs isolated from SB Crohn's patients. Thus, small intestinal CD103+ DCs represent a potential novel target for regulating human intestinal inflammatory responses