Semantic Wide and Deep Learning for Detecting Crisis-Information Categories on Social Media

When crises hit, many flog to social media to share or consume information related to the event. Social media posts during crises tend to provide valuable reports on affected people, donation offers, help requests, advice provision, etc. Automatically identifying the category of information (e.g., reports on affected individuals, donations and volunteers) contained in these posts is vital for their efficient handling and consumption by effected communities and concerned organisations. In this paper, we introduce Sem-CNN; a wide and deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model designed for identifying the category of information contained in crisis-related social media content. Unlike previous models, which mainly rely on the lexical representations of words in the text, the proposed model integrates an additional layer of semantics that represents the named entities in the text, into a wide and deep CNN network. Results show that the Sem-CNN model consistently outperforms the baselines which consist of statistical and non-semantic deep learning models

Comparison of Monomethylhydrazine/Hydroxypropylcellulose and Hydrocarbon/Silica Gels

Experimental studies have been performed to investigate rheology and droplet burning with different types of gelled propellants. Monomethylhydrazine has been gelled with organic hydroxypropylcellulose. JP-8 and RP-1 hydrocarbon gels have been produced with inorganic fumed silica particles. Rheological characterization showed the differences in terms of viscosity and yield stress behavior due to different types of gelling agents. Herschel-Bulkley and Carreau-Yasuda models have been used to characterize the gels with inorganic and organic gelling agents, respectively. First experiments with the Monomethylhydrazine/hydroxypropylcellulose gels showed a typical swelling process during combustion with a flexible viscous droplet surface. Contrary to that, the hydrocarbon/silica gels burned while a rigid silica structure was built, which remained unburned. Burning drop measurements have been compared to the d^2-squared law

Future-Viewer: An Efficient Framework for Navigating and Classifying Audio-Visual Documents

In this paper we present an intuitive framework named Future-Viewer, introduced for the effective visualization of spatiotemporal low-level features, in the context of browsing and retrieval of a multimedia document. This tool is used to facilitate the access to the content and to improve the understanding of the semantics associated to the considered multimedia document. The main visualization paradigm employed consists in representing a 2D feature space in which the video document shots are located. The features that characterize the 2D space's axes can be selected by the user. Shots with similar content fall near each other, and the tool offers various functionalities for automatically nding and annotating shot clusters in the feature space. These annotations can also be stored in MPEG7 format. The use of this application to browse the content of few audio-video sequences demonstrate very interesting capabilities

Downhole Seismic Cone Analysis Using Digital Signal Processing

In-situ measurement of the dynamic characteristics of surficial soils is becoming more common in geotechnical practice for prediction of ground surface motions from earthquake excitation and to evaluate foundations for vibrating equipment. Techniques for these measurements have been under development at the University Of British Columbia (U.B.C.) since 1980. The paper discusses many practical considerations with respect to equipment (sources, receivers, trigger, etc.) and procedures that can affect the interpretation and analysis of seismic cone results. A brief review is given of the cross-over method as used at UBC to determine interval shear velocity travel times from downhole seismic cone testing. A more detailed description is provided for the cross-correlation technique used in the frequency domain that has recently been incorporated into the analysis procedure. Comparisons of these two methods are presented and discussed

lnsitu Measurement of Damping of Soils

The Seismic Cone Penetration Test (SCPT) has been shown to give reasonable results for insitu measurements of shear wave velocity, and this paper extends this work to include measurements of damping. The relevant equations of motion are described, factors affecting amplitude decay are discussed, and the nature of damping is summarized. Consideration is given to some of the practical aspects of pre-processing of signals. Three methods of damping calculation are presented. The first two, attenuation coefficient and modified SHAKE methods, require the application of amplitude corrections, which is not straight-forward, give variable results, and indicate negative damping in a clayey silt layer. The third, the spectral slope method eliminates the need for amplitude corrections and gives less variable and more acceptable results. The spectral slope method gave damping measurements of about 2% to 3% for sand and 0.3% to 0.5% for silt, at low strain levels of 10-4 to 10-3%

ICONA: Inter Cluster ONOS Network Application

Several Network Operating Systems (NOS) have been proposed in the last few years for Software Defined Networks; however, a few of them are currently offering the resiliency, scalability and high availability required for production environments. Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) is an open source NOS, designed to be reliable and to scale up to thousands of managed devices. It supports multiple concurrent instances (a cluster of controllers) with distributed data stores. A tight requirement of ONOS is that all instances must be close enough to have negligible communication delays, which means they are typically installed within a single datacenter or a LAN network. However in certain wide area network scenarios, this constraint may limit the speed of responsiveness of the controller toward network events like failures or congested links, an important requirement from the point of view of a Service Provider. This paper presents ICONA, a tool developed on top of ONOS and designed in order to extend ONOS capability in network scenarios where there are stringent requirements in term of control plane responsiveness. In particular the paper describes the architecture behind ICONA and provides some initial evaluation obtained on a preliminary version of the tool.Comment: Paper submitted to a conferenc