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

Defining crash configurations for Powered Two-Wheelers: Comparing ISO 13232 to recent in-depth crash data from Germany, India and China

The motorcyclist safety standard ISO 13232, based on crash data from Europe and the USA from the 1970s, still sets the direction for the development and evaluation of protective measures today. However, it is unclear how relevant the crash configurations in the standard are to present-day motorcycle crashes in Europe, the USA and other parts of the world. We analyzed recent in-depth crash data from Germany, India and China, examining powered two-wheeler (PTW) crash configurations in which at least one police-reported serious injury was present. After assessing the relevance of the ISO\u27s PTW crash configurations to those we found in each country, we suggested new configurations to guide the development of safety systems that would be more effective at reducing PTW-related fatalities and serious injuries. In all three databases, passenger cars were among the top two most frequent collision partners and a car front impacting the side of the PTW was the most common configuration. Notably, although collisions with trucks constituted the most common scenario in India and ground impact (primary collision) was a common scenario in both Germany and India, the ISO did not include either configuration. Further, in three of the seven ISO crash configurations, one of the collision partners is stationary, although stationary collision partners were rare in our data. Our results show that the ISO crash configurations do not represent the most frequent PTW road crashes in Germany, India or China. However, the Chinese database was confined to crashes with a collision partner with four or more wheels. Further, weighting factors for these data were not available, so we could not extrapolate the frequency of the Chinese crash configurations across the entire population. A revised version of the ISO could serve as a basis for a full-scale PTW crash test program. However, the observed differences between countries imply that a single global standard may not be feasible. To optimize the evaluation of a PTW safety system, we recommend the inclusion of configurations which are frequent in the region or country of interest—in addition to common configurations occurring frequently all around the world

Short-term variability of a sample of 29 trans-Neptunian objects and Centaurs

We present results of 6 years of observations, reduced and analyzed with the same tools in a systematic way. We report completely new data for 15 objects, for 5 objects we present a new analysis of previously published results plus additional data and for 9 objects we present a new analysis of data already published. Lightcurves, possible rotation periods and photometric amplitudes are reported for all of them. The photometric variability is smaller than previously thought: the mean amplitude of our sample is 0.1mag and only around 15% of our sample has a larger variability than 0.15mag. The smaller variability than previously thought seems to be a bias of previous observations. We find a very weak trend of faster spinning objects towards smaller sizes, which appears to be consistent with the fact that the smaller objects are more collisionally evolved, but could also be a specific feature of the Centaurs, the smallest objects in our sample. We also find that the smaller the objects, the larger their amplitude, which is also consistent with the idea that small objects are more collisionally evolved and thus more deformed. Average rotation rates from our work are 7.5h for the whole sample, 7.6h for the TNOs alone and 7.3h for the Centaurs. All of them appear to be somewhat faster than what one can derive from a compilation of the scientific literature and our own results. Maxwellian fits to the rotation rate distribution give mean values of 7.5h (for the whole sample) and 7.3h (for the TNOs only). Assuming hydrostatic equilibrium we can determine densities from our sample under the additional assumption that the lightcurves are dominated by shape effects, which is likely not realistic. The resulting average density is 0.92g/cm^3 which is not far from the density constraint that one can derive from the apparent spin barrier that we observe.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

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

PROPHECY—a yeast phenome database, update 2006

Connecting genotype to phenotype is fundamental in biomedical research and in our understanding of disease. Phenomics—the large-scale quantitative phenotypic analysis of genotypes on a genome-wide scale—connects automated data generation with the development of novel tools for phenotype data integration, mining and visualization. Our yeast phenomics database PROPHECY is available at . Via phenotyping of 984 heterozygous diploids for all essential genes the genotypes analysed and presented in PROPHECY have been extended and now include all genes in the yeast genome. Further, phenotypic data from gene overexpression of 574 membrane spanning proteins has recently been included. To facilitate the interpretation of quantitative phenotypic data we have developed a new phenotype display option, the Comparative Growth Curve Display, where growth curve differences for a large number of mutants compared with the wild type are easily revealed. In addition, PROPHECY now offers a more informative and intuitive first-sight display of its phenotypic data via its new summary page. We have also extended the arsenal of data analysis tools to include dynamic visualization of phenotypes along individual chromosomes. PROPHECY is an initiative to enhance the growing field of phenome bioinformatics

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