The Mutual Interpretation of Active and Passive Microwave Sensor Outputs

Mutual interpretation of active and passive microwave sensor output

Why is Learning from National Working Life Programmes not a Matter of Course?

"Public policy programmes in the field of working life reforms may be needed, but they cannot do more than supplement the genuine dynamics of the working life. They can influence people’s perceptions of the problems and the work forms applied in organizing development. Power relations in private and public organizations, as results of business and societal trends, are obstacles to innovative and anthropocentric oriented reforms in working life. The more participative elements funded projects have been integrated, the more robust are their outcomes. National programme structures have to strive for the establishment of persistent local-level development coalitions, and to support collaboration of all actors concerned in development processes. International networking is possibly a learning facilitator. The implementation of, and learning from, reform programmes from the 1970s to our time is analyzed, with a focus on personal experiences from research, project management and evaluation of Scandinavian and German programmes." (author's abstract

Holographic Chern-Simons Theories

Chern-Simons theories in three dimensions are topological field theories that may have a holographic interpretation for suitable chosen gauge groups and boundary conditions on the fields. Conformal Chern-Simons gravity is a topological model of 3-dimensional gravity that exhibits Weyl invariance and allows various holographic descriptions, including Anti-de Sitter, Lobachevsky and flat space holography. The same model also allows to address some aspects that arise in higher spin gravity in a considerably simplified setup, since both types of models have gauge symmetries other than diffeomorphisms. In these lectures we summarize briefly recent results.Comment: 20 pp, invited lectures prepared for the 7th Aegean Summer School "Beyond Einstein's Theory of Gravity", 201

Receiver Architectures for MIMO-OFDM Based on a Combined VMP-SP Algorithm

Iterative information processing, either based on heuristics or analytical frameworks, has been shown to be a very powerful tool for the design of efficient, yet feasible, wireless receiver architectures. Within this context, algorithms performing message-passing on a probabilistic graph, such as the sum-product (SP) and variational message passing (VMP) algorithms, have become increasingly popular. In this contribution, we apply a combined VMP-SP message-passing technique to the design of receivers for MIMO-ODFM systems. The message-passing equations of the combined scheme can be obtained from the equations of the stationary points of a constrained region-based free energy approximation. When applied to a MIMO-OFDM probabilistic model, we obtain a generic receiver architecture performing iterative channel weight and noise precision estimation, equalization and data decoding. We show that this generic scheme can be particularized to a variety of different receiver structures, ranging from high-performance iterative structures to low complexity receivers. This allows for a flexible design of the signal processing specially tailored for the requirements of each specific application. The numerical assessment of our solutions, based on Monte Carlo simulations, corroborates the high performance of the proposed algorithms and their superiority to heuristic approaches

APPLYING TERRAIN AND HYDROLOGICAL EDITING TO TANDEM-X DATA TO CREATE A CONSUMER-READY WORLDDEM PRODUCT

The Geo-intelligence division of Airbus Defence and Space and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have partnered to produce the first fully global, high-accuracy Digital Surface Model (DSM) using SAR data from the twin satellite constellation: TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X. The DLR is responsible for the processing and distribution of the TanDEM-X elevation model for the world's scientific community, while Airbus DS is responsible for the commercial production and distribution of the data, under the brand name WorldDEM™. For the provision of a consumer-ready product, Airbus DS undertakes several steps to reduce the effect of radar-specific artifacts in the WorldDEM data. These artifacts can be divided into two categories: terrain and hydrological. Airbus DS has developed proprietary software and processes to detect and correct these artifacts in the most efficient manner. Some processes are fullyautomatic, while others require manual or semi-automatic control by operators