Seeing the light: artificial evolution, real vision

This paper describes results from a specialised piece of visuo-robotic equipment which allows the artificial evolution of control systems for visually guided autonomous agents acting in the real world. Preliminary experiments with the equipment are described in which dynamical recurrent networks and visual sampling morphologies are concurrently evolved to allow agents to robustly perform simple visually guided tasks. Some of these control systems are shown to exhibit a surprising degree of adaptiveness when tested against generalised versions of the task for which they were evolved

Founders Day 1959

Founders Day 1959 Reel #12

Energy Information Augmented Community-Based Energy Reduction

More than one-half of all U.S. states have instituted energy efficiency mandates requiring utilities to reduce energy use. To achieve these goals, utilities have been permitted rate structures to help them incentivize energy reduction projects. This strategy is proving to be only modestly successful in stemming energy consumption growth. By the same token, community energy reduction programs have achieved moderate to very significant energy reduction. The research described here offers an important tool to strengthen the community energy reduction efforts—by providing such efforts energy information tailored to the energy use patterns of each building occupant. The information provided most importantly helps each individual energy customer understand their potential for energy savings and what reduction measures are most important to them. This information can be leveraged by the leading community organization to prompt greater action in its community. A number of case studies of this model are shown. Early results are promising

Ariel - Volume 2 Number 3

Editors Delvyn C. Case, Jr. Paul M. Fernhoff News Editors Richard Bonanno Daniel B. Gould Robin A. Edwards Lay-Out Editor Carol Dolinskas Sports Editor James J. Nocon Contributing Editors Michael J. Blecker Lin Sey Edwards Jack Guralnik W. Cherry Light Features Editor Steven A. Ager Donald A. Bergman Stephen P. Flynn Business Manager Nick Greg

Maxon is an Optimal Suture for Bile Duct Anastomoses in Pigs

Background. Three commonly used sutures were tested in a pig model of bile duct anastomosis to assess their relative contributions to inflammation and scarring

Understanding Uncertainties in Thermographic Imaging

7 p.The present article proposes a workflow based on free/open-source software solutions for the acquisition of competences in engineering courses related to the use of thermographic images. The approach is aimed to three-dimensional visualization techniques over thermographic images to improve the comprehension and interpretation of the different error sources that affects the measurements, and therefore the conclusions and analysis derived from them. The present work is framed inside the virtual laboratories discipline, as the new learning material can be employed for the acquisition of competences and skills. Additionally, it can be used for the evaluation of competences in asynchronous and e-learning programs. The learning materials could be easily deployed in a learning management system, allowing the students to work with the models by means of open-source solutions easily, both in asynchronous and face-to-face courses. Consequently, the present approach will improve the application of professional techniques, so the future professionals will reach the working market better prepared.S

Lambda Station: Alternate Network Path Forwarding for Production SciDAC Applications

The LHC era will start very soon, creating immense data volumes capable of demanding allocation of an entire network circuit for task-driven applications. Circuit-based alternate network paths are one solution to meeting the LHC high bandwidth network requirements. The Lambda Station project is aimed at addressing growing requirements for dynamic allocation of alternate network paths. Lambda Station facilitates the rerouting of designated traffic through site LAN infrastructure onto so-called 'high-impact' wide-area networks. The prototype Lambda Station developed with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach in mind will be presented. Lambda Station has been successfully integrated into the production version of the Storage Resource Manager (SRM), and deployed at US CMS Tier1 center at Fermilab, as well as at US-CMS Tier-2 site at Caltech. This paper will discuss experiences using the prototype system with production SciDAC applications for data movement between Fermilab and Caltech. The architecture and design principles of the production version Lambda Station software, currently being implemented as Java based web services, will also be presented in this paper

Data hosting infrastructure for primary biodiversity data

© The Author(s), 2011. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in BMC Bioinformatics 12 Suppl. 15 (2011): S5, doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-S15-S5.Today, an unprecedented volume of primary biodiversity data are being generated worldwide, yet significant amounts of these data have been and will continue to be lost after the conclusion of the projects tasked with collecting them. To get the most value out of these data it is imperative to seek a solution whereby these data are rescued, archived and made available to the biodiversity community. To this end, the biodiversity informatics community requires investment in processes and infrastructure to mitigate data loss and provide solutions for long-term hosting and sharing of biodiversity data. We review the current state of biodiversity data hosting and investigate the technological and sociological barriers to proper data management. We further explore the rescuing and re-hosting of legacy data, the state of existing toolsets and propose a future direction for the development of new discovery tools. We also explore the role of data standards and licensing in the context of data hosting and preservation. We provide five recommendations for the biodiversity community that will foster better data preservation and access: (1) encourage the community's use of data standards, (2) promote the public domain licensing of data, (3) establish a community of those involved in data hosting and archival, (4) establish hosting centers for biodiversity data, and (5) develop tools for data discovery. The community's adoption of standards and development of tools to enable data discovery is essential to sustainable data preservation. Furthermore, the increased adoption of open content licensing, the establishment of data hosting infrastructure and the creation of a data hosting and archiving community are all necessary steps towards the community ensuring that data archival policies become standardized