ConEditor+: Capture and Maintenance of Constraints in Engineering Design

The Designers' Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. Further, we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as "application conditions". We show that an explicit representation of application conditions, in a machine interpretable format, along with the constraints and the domain ontology can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints

Fricatives, affricates, and vowels in Cantonese-speaking children with cochlear implants : an acoustic study

The aim of the present study was to acoustically analyze speech performance of Cantonese-speaking children with cochlear implants over a three-month period, and compare it with that of the hearing controls. Three categories of sounds in Cantonese were focused: vowels /i/, /ɛ/, /a/, /ɔ/ and /u/ (first and second formant frequencies), fricatives /s/ and /f/ (noise centre of gravity), and affricates /ts/ and /tsh/ (accuracy, production pattern and duration). Twenty-one subjects with cochlear implants and 21 hearing subjects matched with age and gender were recruited. Speech samples were recorded and analyzed. The results showed that children with cochlear implants demonstrated statistically significant deviated performance for vowels, fricatives, and affricates when compared with the hearing controls. However, children with cochlear implants showed an overall improvement in speech performance for all the sound categories at the second recording. The results supported that prolonged use of cochlear implants brings beneficial effect.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

A Deterministic Equivalent for the Analysis of Non-Gaussian Correlated MIMO Multiple Access Channels

Large dimensional random matrix theory (RMT) has provided an efficient analytical tool to understand multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels and to aid the design of MIMO wireless communication systems. However, previous studies based on large dimensional RMT rely on the assumption that the transmit correlation matrix is diagonal or the propagation channel matrix is Gaussian. There is an increasing interest in the channels where the transmit correlation matrices are generally nonnegative definite and the channel entries are non-Gaussian. This class of channel models appears in several applications in MIMO multiple access systems, such as small cell networks (SCNs). To address these problems, we use the generalized Lindeberg principle to show that the Stieltjes transforms of this class of random matrices with Gaussian or non-Gaussian independent entries coincide in the large dimensional regime. This result permits to derive the deterministic equivalents (e.g., the Stieltjes transform and the ergodic mutual information) for non-Gaussian MIMO channels from the known results developed for Gaussian MIMO channels, and is of great importance in characterizing the spectral efficiency of SCNs.Comment: This paper is the revision of the original manuscript titled "A Deterministic Equivalent for the Analysis of Small Cell Networks". We have revised the original manuscript and reworked on the organization to improve the presentation as well as readabilit

Achieving Balance Through the Art of Eating: Demystifying Eastern Nutrition and Blending it with Western Nutrition

AbstractEastern and Western approaches to nutrition are unique and possess both strengths and weaknesses. Blending the best of both techniques will allow for the development of an integrative nutrition system that is more effective than either tradition on its own. The Western view to nutrition is already adopting certain attributes of the Eastern medicine philosophy as exemplified by the progression towards individualized nutrition through methods such as nutrigenetics. Nevertheless, many differences still remain between Eastern and Western nutritional concepts. Becoming fluent in both Western and Eastern methodologies can ensure the extraction of the best from both techniques for the development of a comprehensive, systematic, and holistic nutritional approach to achieve optimal health

Multi-HDCS: solving DisCSPs with complex local problems cooperatively.

We propose Multi-HDCS, a new hybrid approach for solving Distributed CSPs with complex local problems. In Multi-HDCS, each agent concurrently: (i) runs a centralised systematic search for its complex local problem; (ii) participates in a distributed local search; (iii) contributes to a distributed systematic search. A centralised systematic search algorithm runs on each agent, finding all non-interchangeable solutions to the agents complex local problem. In order to find a solution to the overall problem, two distributed algorithms which only consider the local solutions found by the centralised systematic searches are run: a local search algorithm identifies the parts of the problem which are most difficult to satisfy, and this information is used in order to find good dynamic variable orderings for a systematic search. We present two implementations of our approach which differ in the strategy used for local search: breakout and penalties on values. Results from an extensive empirical evaluation indicate that these two Multi-HDCS implementations are competitive against existing distributed local and systematic search techniques on both solvable and unsolvable distributed CSPs with complex local problems