Sustainable Mobility as Essential Ingredient for Vibrant Cities: 3 Cases in Point

Achieving smart urban mobility: the case of Zürich 198

Ehrenzweig and the Statute of Frauds: An Inquiry Into the Rule of Validation

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are used today in a wide range of applications, mainly because they can dramatically accelerate parallel computing, are affordable and energy efficient. In the field of medical imaging, GPUs are in some cases crucial for enabling practical use of computationally demanding algorithms. This review presents the past and present work on GPU accelerated medical image processing, and is meant to serve as an overview and introduction to existing GPU implementations. The review covers GPU acceleration of basic image processing operations (filtering, interpolation, histogram estimation and distance transforms), the most commonly used algorithms in medical imaging (image registration, image segmentation and image denoising) and algorithms that are specific to individual modalities (CT, PET, SPECT, MRI, fMRI, DTI, ultrasound, optical imaging and microscopy). The review ends by highlighting some future possibilities and challenges

The founding and development of Louvain-la-Neuve, the only new town of Belgium

SUMMARY OF FACTSThe Louvain-la-Neuve new university town has been built by the University of Louvain on a previously agricultural and forested site of 920 ha, following a master plan drawn up by the “Groupe Urbanisme-Architecture” (R. Lemaire, J.-P. Blondel and P. Laconte). The first phase opened in 1972, comprising the science faculties, the science library (architect A. Jacqmain), student and commercial housing, shops and restaurants. Each phase was linked to the overall project and planned as a potentially multifunctional and autonomous unit along an east-west pedestrian spine. There has been direct rail access to Brussels since 1976. In 2005 a 35.000 m2 shopping centre opened next to the station (with 8 million visitors in 2014), which is to be extended above the railway tracks. The 2014 estimated daytime population of the new town was 45.000 (with 12.000 residents, out of 31.000 for the city of Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve). The land remains entirely in the university’s ownership and is developed through long term leases.OBJECTIVES OF THE PAPER. The proposed paper addresses the following research issues:1. What skills were developed by “Groupe Urbanisme-Architecture” and its staff in order to conceive and create this new university town? How were they appointed? What was their urban model (one inspired by the mix of land uses found in historic towns, as opposed to the functionalist approach in which these are separated)? How was finance secured? How were the faculties involved in the implementation of the plan? How are the inhabitants and students involved? Could this experience inform present-day land use planning and urban design?2. How did the1970 master plan adapt to change: e.g. in demography, in housing demand, in the university’s teaching and research needs and those of university-related industry, in the social, cultural and political environment, and from small individual plots to developer-led projects?3. Which wider issues of planning research are raised by the Louvain example? These include:- the overall rationale for new town development, its up-front investment needs and its governance challenges (i.e. relations with existing local authorities).- the pros and cons of long-term leases as a tool for property development.- the economic and ecological justification of a linear pedestrian spine as a development model. This entails making vehicular traffic and parking accessible from the perimeter or putting it underground.- the economic and ecological justification for separating water treatment and storm water collection into a reservoir, treated as a lake whose depth varies according to the seasons.- the case for small plots and high density-low rise buildings versus large plots and high density-high rise.- the optimal location of the main squares and public spaces in a new town

“Not One Looks like My Daughter!”: How American Girl Makes History Hegemony

American Girl markets dolls and books toward girls. Their original product line, which features historical characters, mobilizes history to teach moral lessons. This paper breaks down these morals to search for hegemony, a discourse that marginalizes minority readers. In this quest to uncover hegemony, the paper deals with issues of narrative perspective and socialization. Regarding narrative perspective, the paper asks, “Whom do these books deem normal in America? Whom do these books deem other in America?” Regarding socialization issues, this paper asks, “What value and behaviors do these books condone as part of acceptable American Girlhood? What values and behaviors are deemed totally aberrant and unacceptable?” In establishing normative perspectives and trajectories, the books raise issues about race, socioeconomic class, gender roles, religious identities, and nationalism. Given this particular line of questioning, this paper falls under the contemporary historical pursuit to problematize the very idea of historical accuracy, to uncover excluded voices from the traditional canon. The paper concludes that American Girl use history to perpetuate hegemony over young women in the United States

The Changing Role of Women in Spain

Spain has experienced the powerful force and changing effects of globalization, especially after the death of Francisco Franco\u27s and the demise of his regime. Spanish women especially have embraced the changing social environment in Spain by enrolling in institutions of higher education in greater numbers and entering the work force by developing careers in business and other fields

Toward Certifying Maps for Safe Localization Under Adversarial Corruption

In this paper, we propose a way to model the resilience of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm in the presence of corrupted measurements. In the context of autonomous vehicles, certifying the safety of the localization process poses a significant challenge. As robots evolve in a complex world, various types of noise can impact the measurements. Conventionally, this noise has been assumed to be distributed according to a zero-mean Gaussian distribution. However, this assumption does not hold in numerous scenarios, including adverse weather conditions, occlusions caused by dynamic obstacles, or long-term changes in the map. In these cases, the measurements are instead affected by a large, deterministic fault. This paper introduces a closed-form formula approximating the highest pose error caused by corrupted measurements using the ICP algorithm. Using this formula, we develop a metric to certify and pinpoint specific regions within the environment where the robot is more vulnerable to localization failures in the presence of faults in the measurements.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L

On the Importance of Quantifying Visibility for Autonomous Vehicles under Extreme Precipitation

In the context of autonomous driving, vehicles are inherently bound to encounter more extreme weather during which public safety must be ensured. As climate is quickly changing, the frequency of heavy snowstorms is expected to increase and become a major threat to safe navigation. While there is much literature aiming to improve navigation resiliency to winter conditions, there is a lack of standard metrics to quantify the loss of visibility of lidar sensors related to precipitation. This chapter proposes a novel metric to quantify the lidar visibility loss in real time, relying on the notion of visibility from the meteorology research field. We evaluate this metric on the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions (CADC) dataset, correlate it with the performance of a state-of-the-art lidar-based localization algorithm, and evaluate the benefit of filtering point clouds before the localization process. We show that the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is surprisingly robust against snowfalls, but abrupt events, such as snow gusts, can greatly hinder its accuracy. We discuss such events and demonstrate the need for better datasets focusing on these extreme events to quantify their effect.Comment: Submitted to Intelligent Vehicles and Transportation Volume 3 - De Gruyte