The EU budget becomes politically more explosive. CEPS Commentary, 3 December 2012

H. Onno Ruding describes the negotiations on the EU budget, which will resume in 2013 following their collapse in late November, as “more awkward than usual”. In this new CEPS Commentary, he advises EU leaders to make the instrument more forward-looking in promoting economic growth in Europe and less focused on maintaining legacy entitlements of past years. In his view, this means more spending on research, innovation, education and infrastructure and also requires further reductions in the still-dominant agricultural subsidies as well as regional and structural funds

Geometry deformation for reducing cybersickness in VR

Virtual reality (VR) technologies became more and more widespread for a couple of years as they got more and more mature. The accessibility to VR highly increased thanks to recent low-cost commercial VR head mounted display systems and easy-to-use development toolkits. One important and well-studied human perception issue is related to motion sickness or cybersickness. In this paper we are dealing with case when users feel a visually induced induced self-motion that are not felt through their vestibular systems. This incoherent movement perception provokes cybersickness to the users. To tackle this issue, we present in this paper a novel method to reduce cybersickness through reducing visually induced self-motion by processing geometrically the virtual scene while navigating. The first prototype of geometry deformation applied on virtual building appearing in the peripheral vision of user has been implemented and experimented. The feedback from the experiment participants shows that the visually induced self-motion is reduced and the navigation quality and presence level are guaranteed

Design and Characterization of 3D-printed Weaire-Phelan Hydrogel Lattices

The objective of this work is to design, fabricate, and characterize scaled and unscaled 3D-printed hydrogel lattices with controlled structural and mechanical anisotropy. These 3D-printed hydrogel lattices could be used to create soft structures of desired shape and consistent mechanical properties for potential use as anisotropic tissue mimics. The topics in this report cover design techniques to generate 3D-modeled unit cell lattices using CAD software, fabrication using SLA, and experimental characterization by bench-top mechanical tests (uniaxial compression test)

The Contents and Timing of a European Banking Union: Reflections on the differing views. CEPS Essay (No. 2), 30 November 2012

Although views differ on the precise contents and timing of a genuine banking union, there is wide political agreement in principle on the need for three basic and vital elements: European bank supervision, a European deposit guarantee scheme (DGS) and a European bank resolution mechanism. In this CEPS Essay, H. Onno Ruding offers his personal views on the progress achieved to date, the outstanding issues that will prove the most difficult to resolve and recommendations on the way forward

Merging enriched Finite Element triangle meshes for fast prototyping of alternate solutions in the context of industrial maintenance

A new approach to the merging of Finite Element (FE) triangle meshes is proposed. Not only it takes into account the geometric aspects, but it also considers the way the semantic information possibly associated to the groups of entities (nodes, faces) can be maintained. Such high level modification capabilities are of major importance in all the engineering activities requiring fast modifications of meshes without going back to the CAD model. This is especially true in the context of industrial maintenance where the engineers often have to solve critical problems in very short time. Indeed, in this case, the product is already designed, the CAD models are not necessarily available and the FE models might be tuned. Thus, the product behaviour has to be studied and improved during its exploitation while prototyping directly several alternate solutions. Such a framework also finds interest in the preliminary design phases where alternative solutions have to be simulated. The algorithm first removes the intersecting faces in an n-ring neighbourhood so that the filling of the created holes produces triangles whose sizes smoothly evolve according to the possibly heterogeneous sizes of the surrounding triagles. The holefilling algorithm is driven by an aspect ratio factor which ensures that the produced triangulation fits well the FE requirements. It is also constrained by the boundaries of the groups of entities gathering together the simulation semantic. The filled areas are then deformed to blend smoothly with the surroundings meshes

Biometrik Telapak tangan menggunkan Transformasi Contourlet dan ALgoritma Genetika

ABSTRAKSI: Setiap manusia memiliki sesuatu yang dapat dikatakan unik. Keunikan tersebut seperti retina mata atau DNA serta sidik jari. Keunikan yang dimiliki oleh manusia biasa digunakan untuk pengenalan suatu identitas dari manusia itu sendiri yang dapat dikombinasikan dengan pengenalan menggunakan bantuan hardware. Dari beberapa keunikan tersebut, sidik jari atau sidik dari telapak tangan lebih dianggap akurat atas keunikannya karena sidik tersebut langsung melekat pada tubuh manusia. Pengenalan dari telapak tangan seseorang merupakan suatu sistem yang cukup penting sekarang ini. Sistem tersebut memcocokan dan membandingkan biometrik telapak tangan manusia yang di inputkan dengan telapak tangan yang tersimpan dalam suatu database penyimpanan. Oleh karena itu, pembandingan antara biometrik telapak tangan yang di inputkan dengan yang telah disimpan sebelumnya merupakan langkah awal untuk mengklasifikasikan atau mengidentifikasi dari telapak manusia yang satu dengan yang lainnya.Dalam tugas akhir ini dibangun suatu sistem yang dapat mendeteksi telapak tangan seseorang yang sudah dimasukan ke dalam database dengan cara mengekstraksi ciri melalui proses transformasi contourlet, setelah itu dioptimasi dengan menggunakan algoritma genetika sehingga dapat mengenali telapak tangan orang tersebut dengan benar.Dalam sistem ini diperoleh tingkat akurasi 97% dengan menggunakan parameter pada algoritma genetika yaitu nilai populasi = 50, generasi = 5, probabilitas crossover = 0.6 dan probabilitas mutasi = 0.6 dengan menggunakan 15 data latih dan 45 data uji sehingga dapat disimpulkan bahwa metode transformasi contourlet dan algoritma genetika dapat digunakan untuk mengidentifikasi telapak tangan manusia karena performansinya yang cukup bagus.Kata Kunci : telapak tangan, contourlet, algoritma genetika.ABSTRACT: Every human being has something that is almost unique. The uniqueness of the eye such as the retina or DNA and fingerprints. Uniqueness of human beings is used for the introduction of an identity of the man himself which can be combined with the introduction of using hardware assistance. Of some of the uniqueness, fingerprints or palm prints of the uniqueness more accurately regarded as the fingerprints directly attached to the human body. The introduction of the palm of one\u27s hand is a system that is quite important now. The system memcocokan and compare biometric palm of the human hand that fed with palms stored in a database storage. Therefore, the comparison between biometric palm of the hand that fed previously saved is the first step to classify or identify of the palm of a human being by another.In this thesis built a system that can detect a person\u27s palm that has been entered into the database by extracting characteristic through contourlet transformation process, once it is optimized by using a genetic algorithm that can recognize the hand of the person correctly.In this system obtained 97% accuracy with value of population = 50, generation = 5, probability crossover = 0.6 and probability mutation = 0.6 rate using 15 training data and 45 test data so that it can be concluded that the method of contourlet transform and genetic algorithms can be used to identify a human hand because its performance is quite good.Keyword: palmprint , contourlet , genetic algorithm

Merging enriched Finite Element triangle meshes for fast prototyping of alternate solutions in the context of industrial maintenance

A new approach to the merging of Finite Element (FE) triangle meshes is proposed. Not only it takes into account the geometric aspects, but it also considers the way the semantic information possibly associated to the groups of entities (nodes, faces) can be maintained. Such high level modification capabilities are of major importance in all the engineering activities requiring fast modifications of meshes without going back to the CAD model. This is especially true in the context of industrial maintenance where the engineers often have to solve critical problems in very short time. Indeed, in this case, the product is already designed, the CAD models are not necessarily available and the FE models might be tuned. Thus, the product behaviour has to be studied and improved during its exploitation while prototyping directly several alternate solutions. Such a framework also finds interest in the preliminary design phases where alternative solutions have to be simulated. The algorithm first removes the intersecting faces in an n-ring neighbourhood so that the filling of the created holes produces triangles whose sizes smoothly evolve according to the possibly heterogeneous sizes of the surrounding triagles. The holefilling algorithm is driven by an aspect ratio factor which ensures that the produced triangulation fits well the FE requirements. It is also constrained by the boundaries of the groups of entities gathering together the simulation semantic. The filled areas are then deformed to blend smoothly with the surroundings meshes

Multi-user interface for co-located real-time work with digital mock-up: a way to foster collaboration?

Nowadays more and more industrial design activities adopt the strategy of Concurrent Engineering (CE), which changes the way to carry out all the activities along the product’s lifecycle from sequential to parallel. Various experts of different activities produce technical data using domain-specific software. To augment the interoperability among the technical data, a Digital Mock-Up (DMU), or a Building Information Model (BIM) in architectural engineering can be used. Through an appropriate Computer–Human Interface (CHI), each expert has his/her own point-of-view (POV) of a specific representation of DMU’s technical data according to an involved domain. When multiple experts work collaboratively in the same place and at the same time, the number of CHIs is also multiplied by the number of experts. Instead of multiple CHIs, therefore, a unique CHI should be developed to support the multiview and multi-interaction collaborative works. Our contributions in this paper are (a) a concept of a CHI system with multi-view and multi-interaction of DMU for multiple users in collaborative design; (b) a state of the art of multi-view and multi-interaction metaphors; (c) an experiment to evaluate a collaborative application using multi-view CHI. The experimental results indicate that, in multi-view CHI working condition, users are more efficient than in the other two working conditions (multiple CHIs and split view CHI). Moreover, in multi-view CHI working condition, the user, who is helping the other, takes less mutual awareness of where the other collaborator works than the other two working conditions.Bourse de thèse de CSC (China Scholarship Council

Geometry deformation for reducing cybersickness in VR

Virtual reality (VR) technologies became more and more widespread for a couple of years as they got more and more mature. The accessibility to VR highly increased thanks to recent low-cost commercial VR head mounted display systems and easy-to-use development toolkits. One important and well-studied human perception issue is related to motion sickness or cybersickness. In this paper we are dealing with case when users feel a visually induced induced self-motion that are not felt through their vestibular systems. This incoherent movement perception provokes cybersickness to the users. To tackle this issue, we present in this paper a novel method to reduce cybersickness through reducing visually induced self-motion by processing geometrically the virtual scene while navigating. The first prototype of geometry deformation applied on virtual building appearing in the peripheral vision of user has been implemented and experimented. The feedback from the experiment participants shows that the visually induced self-motion is reduced and the navigation quality and presence level are guaranteed