In-situ and remote monitoring of environmental water quality

Environmental water pollution affects human health and reduces the quality of our natural water ecosystems and resources. As a result, there is great interest in monitoring water quality and ensuring that all areas are compliant with legislation. Ubiquitous water quality monitoring places considerable demands upon existing sensing technology. The combined challenges of system longevity, autonomous operation, robustness, large-scale sensor networks, operationally difficult deployments and unpredictable and lossy environments collectively represents a technological barrier that has yet to be overcome[1]. Ubiquitous sensing envisages many aspects of our environment being routinely sensed. This will result in data streams from a large variety of heterogeneous sources, which will often vary in their volume and accuracy. The challenge is to develop a networked sensing infrastructure that can support the effective capture, filtering, aggregation and analysis of such data. This will ultimately enable us to dynamically monitor and track the quality of our environment at multiple locations. Microfluidic technology provides a route to the development of miniaturised analytical instruments that could be deployed remotely, and operate autonomously over relatively long periods of time (months–years). An example of such a system is the autonomous phosphate sensor[2] which has been developed at the CLARITY Centre, in Dublin City University. This technology, in combination with the availability of low power, reliable wireless communications platforms that can link sensors and analytical devices to online databases and servers, form the basis for extensive networks of autonomous analytical ‘stations’ or ‘nodes’ that will provide high quality information about key chemical parameters that determine the quality of our aquatic environment. The system must also have sufficient intelligence to enable adaptive sampling regimes as well as accurate and efficient decision-making responses. A particularly exciting area of development is the combination of remote satellite/aircraft based monitoring with the in-situ ground-based monitoring described above. Remote observations from satellites and aircraft can provide significant amounts of information on the state of the aquatic environment over large areas. As in-situ deployments of sensor networks become more widespread and reliable, and satellite data becomes more widely available, information from each of these sources can complement and validate the other, leading to an increased ability to rapidly detect potentially harmful events, and to assess the impact of environmental pressures on scales ranging from small river catchments to the open ocean. In this paper, we will assess the current status of these approaches, and the challenges that must be met in order to realise the vision of true internet- or global-scale monitoring of our environment. References: [1] Integration of analytical measurements and wireless communications – Current issues and future strategies. King Tong Lau, Sarah Brady, John Cleary and Dermot Diamond, Talanta 75 (2008) 606–612. [2] An autonomous microfluidic sensor for phosphate: on-site analysis of treated wastewater. John Cleary, Conor Slater, Christina McGraw and Dermot Diamond, IEEE Sensors Journal, 8 (2008) 508-515

The Influence of Religion and Ethnonationalism on Public Attitudes towards Amnesty : Northern Ireland as a Case Study

The 2011 Northern Ireland Social and Political Attitudes Survey was collected by John D. Brewer and Bernadette C. Hayes and was funded by the Leverhulme Trust under the Compromise After Conflict Programme (Grant no. F/00/152/AK).Peer reviewedPostprin

EvoTanks: co-evolutionary development of game-playing agents

This paper describes the EvoTanks research project, a continuing attempt to develop strong AI players for a primitive 'Combat' style video game using evolutionary computational methods with artificial neural networks. A small but challenging feat due to the necessity for agent's actions to rely heavily on opponent behaviour. Previous investigation has shown the agents are capable of developing high performance behaviours by evolving against scripted opponents; however these are local to the trained opponent. The focus of this paper shows results from the use of co-evolution on the same population. Results show agents no longer succumb to trappings of local maxima within the search space and are capable of converging on high fitness behaviours local to their population without the use of scripted opponents

Gate-Level Simulation of Quantum Circuits

While thousands of experimental physicists and chemists are currently trying to build scalable quantum computers, it appears that simulation of quantum computation will be at least as critical as circuit simulation in classical VLSI design. However, since the work of Richard Feynman in the early 1980s little progress was made in practical quantum simulation. Most researchers focused on polynomial-time simulation of restricted types of quantum circuits that fall short of the full power of quantum computation. Simulating quantum computing devices and useful quantum algorithms on classical hardware now requires excessive computational resources, making many important simulation tasks infeasible. In this work we propose a new technique for gate-level simulation of quantum circuits which greatly reduces the difficulty and cost of such simulations. The proposed technique is implemented in a simulation tool called the Quantum Information Decision Diagram (QuIDD) and evaluated by simulating Grover's quantum search algorithm. The back-end of our package, QuIDD Pro, is based on Binary Decision Diagrams, well-known for their ability to efficiently represent many seemingly intractable combinatorial structures. This reliance on a well-established area of research allows us to take advantage of existing software for BDD manipulation and achieve unparalleled empirical results for quantum simulation

From christ-haunted region to anomic anyplace: Religion in the 20th century south

"“While the South is hardly Christ-centered,” Flannery O’Connor memorably declared in 1960 on the college lecture circuit, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows.”1 A Catholic in a regional sea of Protestants, a single woman in a patriarchal culture, a writer and intellectual living on a farm in rural Georgia, O’Connor in these remarks tersely and brilliantly evoked something elemental about the mid-20th century South: that its denizens—women and men, rich and poor, black and white—couldn’t imagine themselves in wholly secular, “modern” categories; they were shaped in indelible ways by theological imagination and longings for sacred reality. The South’s public square, as a basic consequence, was noticeably not “naked,” but clothed in all sorts of ways by the traces and trappings of religion, specifically Protestant Christianity."(...

Fault Testing for Reversible Circuits

Applications of reversible circuits can be found in the fields of low-power computation, cryptography, communications, digital signal processing, and the emerging field of quantum computation. Furthermore, prototype circuits for low-power applications are already being fabricated in CMOS. Regardless of the eventual technology adopted, testing is sure to be an important component in any robust implementation. We consider the test set generation problem. Reversibility affects the testing problem in fundamental ways, making it significantly simpler than for the irreversible case. For example, we show that any test set that detects all single stuck-at faults in a reversible circuit also detects all multiple stuck-at faults. We present efficient test set constructions for the standard stuck-at fault model as well as the usually intractable cell-fault model. We also give a practical test set generation algorithm, based on an integer linear programming formulation, that yields test sets approximately half the size of those produced by conventional ATPG.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures. to appear in IEEE Trans. on CA