The Macrame 1024 node switching network

The work reported involves the construction of a large modular testbed using IEEE 1355 DS link technology. A thousand nodes will be interconnected by a switching fabric based on the STC104 packet switch. The system has been designed and constructed in a modular way in order to allow a variety of different network topologies to be investigated. Network throughput and latency have been studied for different network topologies under various traffic conditions

Imperfect Information in Logic and Concurrent Games

Abstract. This paper builds on a recent definition of concurrent games as event structures and an application giving a concurrent-game model for predicate calculus. An extension to concurrent games with imperfect information, through the introduction of ‘access levels ’ to restrict the allowable strategies, leads to a concurrent-game semantics for a variant of Hintikka and Sandu’s Independence-Friendly (IF) logic

Deciding the Borel complexity of regular tree languages

We show that it is decidable whether a given a regular tree language belongs to the class ${\bf \Delta^0_2}$ of the Borel hierarchy, or equivalently whether the Wadge degree of a regular tree language is countable.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

From theory to practice of transition management: The case of Sustainable Living and Housing in Flanders

Our modern complex society and its problems of realizing long-term sustainable development necessitate new forms of governance. In recent years a number of publications have been made on transition management as a new mode of governance that explicitly deals with societal complexity (D. Loorbach, 2007; J. Rotmans, Grin, Schot, & Smits, 2004; J. Rotmans, Kemp, & Van Asselt, 2001). This approach towards dealing with governance and complexity explicitly links analysis of complexity to the governance hereof. Observed dynamics in society provide the basis for formulating governance strategies and instruments, while the implementation of transition management simultaneously leads to more precise or altered interpretations of observed reality. Transition management as formulated in (D. Loorbach, 2007) presents a framework for structuring governance processes directed towards societal innovation. This framework distinguishes between different types of activities (strategic, tactical and operational) and different phases (envisioning, agenda-building, experimentation and evaluation). The basic assumption is that this framework is generic and can be used to implement transition management within any specific context (being a specific policy domain or political culture). The proposed paper aims to illustrate how the framework can be used to implement transition management and under which conditions such an implementation of transition management can be successful. This will be done by analyzing the project ‘Sustainable Living and Housing in Flanders’, in which the two authors functioned as project leaders

What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?

The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are alsoexpecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughoutengineering programmes. Nevertheless, there is still little known on how the process of evaluating ethics can best serve the function of accreditation ensuring quality assurance and quality improvement. The aim of this paper is to look at the top-down approach and analyse what role engineering ethics plays in national accreditation documentations in Europe. A multi-country analysis of how and where ethics appears in the systems of accreditation was carried out for the UK, Ireland, France, and Switzerland. The competencies, programme outcomes or learning outcomes were reviewed and explicit or implicit references to ethics education were identified. A quantitative and qualitative word analysis was carried out by extracting verbs and comparing verb definitions that were stated. Verbs were categorised under Doing actions, Thinking actions or both and compared to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. In all cases, ethics was explicitly mentioned however limited to 1 or 2 sections of the documents reviewed. The majority of statements linking to ethics were implicit,opening room for interpretation. A more conscious effort to engage engineeringethics in all aspects of engineering programmes as well as using higher levels ofBloom’s taxonomy should be made where engineering ethics education is applied in practice

What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?

The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are alsoexpecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughoutengineering programmes. Nevertheless, there is still little known on how the process of evaluating ethics can best serve the function of accreditation ensuring quality assurance and quality improvement. The aim of this paper is to look at the top-down approach and analyse what role engineering ethics plays in national accreditation documentations in Europe. A multi-country analysis of how and where ethics appears in the systems of accreditation was carried out for the UK, Ireland, France, and Switzerland. The competencies, programme outcomes or learning outcomes were reviewed and explicit or implicit references to ethics education were identified. A quantitative and qualitative word analysis was carried out by extracting verbs and comparing verb definitions that were stated. Verbs were categorised under Doing actions, Thinking actions or both and compared to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. In all cases, ethics was explicitly mentioned however limited to 1 or 2 sections of the documents reviewed. The majority of statements linking to ethics were implicit,opening room for interpretation. A more conscious effort to engage engineeringethics in all aspects of engineering programmes as well as using higher levels ofBloom’s taxonomy should be made where engineering ethics education is applied in practice

High-resolution radiation mapping to investigate FDNPP derived contaminant migration

AbstractAs of March 2016, five years will have passed since the earthquake and ensuing tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s eastern coast, resulting in the explosive release of significant quantities of radioactive material. Over this period, significant time and resource has been expended on both the study of the contamination as well as its remediation from the affected environments. Presented in this work is a high-spatial resolution foot-based radiation mapping study using gamma-spectrometry at a site in the contaminated Iitate Village; conducted at different times, seventeen months apart. The specific site selected for this work was one in which consistent uniform agriculture was observed across its entire extent. From these surveys, obtained from along the main northwest trending line of the fallout plume, it was possible to determine the rate of reduction in the levels of contamination around the site attributable to the natural decay of the radiocesium, remediation efforts or material transport. Results from the work suggest that neither the natural decay of radiocesium nor its downward migration through the soil horizons were responsible for the decline in measured activity levels across the site, with the mobilisation of contaminant species likely adhered to soil particulate and the subsequent fluvial transport responsible for the measurable reduction in activity. This transport of contaminant via fluvial methods has already well studied implications for the input of contaminant material entering the neighbouring Pacific Ocean, as well as the deposition of material along rivers within previously decontaminated areas

Discounting in Games across Time Scales

We introduce two-level discounted games played by two players on a perfect-information stochastic game graph. The upper level game is a discounted game and the lower level game is an undiscounted reachability game. Two-level games model hierarchical and sequential decision making under uncertainty across different time scales. We show the existence of pure memoryless optimal strategies for both players and an ordered field property for such games. We show that if there is only one player (Markov decision processes), then the values can be computed in polynomial time. It follows that whether the value of a player is equal to a given rational constant in two-level discounted games can be decided in NP intersected coNP. We also give an alternate strategy improvement algorithm to compute the value