YODA – Your Only Design Assistant

Converting user interface designs created by graphic designers into computer code is a typical job of a front end engineer in order to develop functional web and mobile applications. This conversion process can often be extremely tedious, slow and prone to human error. In this project, deep learning based object detection along with optical character recognition is used to generate platform ready prototypes directly from design sketches. Also, a new design language is introduced to facilitate expressive prototyping and allowing the creation of more expressive and functional designs. It is observed that the AI powered application along with modern web technology can significantly help streamline and automate the overall product development routine and eliminate hurdles from the product development process

Mountain Monitor - 1st Quarter 2015

This analysis of employment, output, unemployment, and house prices finds that the 10 major metropolitan areas of the Mountain West, despite significant economic headwinds, weathered the first quarter of 2015 with robust economic growth. Eight of the region’s 10 major metro areas advanced on all four metrics of economic performance, and the remaining two metro areas slipped only on a single front. The national economic slowdown that arrived in early 2015 did not entirely bypass the Mountain West, but the region resisted the drag better than any other. As U.S. economic output contracted by 0.3 percent in the first quarter, Mountain region output expanded by 0.2 percent. Nine out of 10 Mountain metro areas achieved positive output growth, compared to only one in five nationwide. Job growth proceeded at its fastest rate in over a year in Mountain metro areas. Employment in the region expanded by 0.9 percent over the quarter, compared to 0.6 percent across the country’s 100 largest metro areas. The region’s major metro areas also reported larger declines in unemployment than did their national peer group, despite already having below-average rates. A chill set in across the region’s housing markets, however. Regionwide, the rate of increase in house prices fell from 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014 to 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2015—a less pronounced decline than at the national level but more pronounced than in other large metro areas. Only in Boise and Colorado Springs did house price growth accelerate. With a 2.2 percent expansion in employment, a 1.0 percent increase in output, and an unemployment rate of 3.0 percent, Provo stood out as the region’s—and perhaps the nation’s—strongest performer in the first quarter. Denver, meanwhile, ended the quarter with nearly 10 percent more jobs than it had in 2008 and remained the only metro area where home prices have fully recovered from the Great Recession. All together, this quarter’s Monitor finds that, although the rates of recovery still differ, steady economic growth appears to have finally taken hold in every one of the region’s major metro areas. This widespread return to growth suggests that—years after a brutal dislocation—the regional economy is getting back on track

Approximation Algorithms for Envy-Free Cake Division with Connected Pieces

Cake cutting is a classic model for studying fair division of a heterogeneous, divisible resource among agents with individual preferences. Addressing cake division under a typical requirement that each agent must receive a connected piece of the cake, we develop approximation algorithms for finding envy-free (fair) cake divisions. In particular, this work improves the state-of-the-art additive approximation bound for this fundamental problem. Our results hold for general cake division instances in which the agents\u27 valuations satisfy basic assumptions and are normalized (to have value 1 for the cake). Furthermore, the developed algorithms execute in polynomial time under the standard Robertson-Webb query model. Prior work has shown that one can efficiently compute a cake division (with connected pieces) in which the additive envy of any agent is at most 1/3. An efficient algorithm is also known for finding connected cake divisions that are (almost) 1/2-multiplicatively envy-free. Improving the additive approximation guarantee and maintaining the multiplicative one, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a connected cake division that is both (1/4 +o(1))-additively envy-free and (1/2 - o(1))-multiplicatively envy-free. Our algorithm is based on the ideas of interval growing and envy-cycle elimination. In addition, we study cake division instances in which the number of distinct valuations across the agents is parametrically bounded. We show that such cake division instances admit a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for connected envy-free cake division

Cracking the Code on Stem: A People Strategy for Nevada\u27s Economy

Nevada has in place a plausible economic diversification strategy—and it’s beginning to work. Now, the state and its regions need to craft a people strategy. Specifically, the state needs to boost the number of Nevadans who possess at least some postsecondary training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or math—the so-called “STEM” disciplines (to which some leaders add arts and design to make it “STEAM”). The moment is urgent—and only heightened by the projected worker needs of Tesla Motors’ planned “gigafactory” for lithium-ion batteries in Storey County. Even before the recent Tesla commitment, a number of the more high-tech industry sectors targeted by the state’s new economic diversification strategy had begun to deliver significant growth. Most notable in fast-growing sectors like Business IT Ecosystems (as defined by the Governor’s Office for Economic Development) and large sectors like Health and Medical Services, this growth has begun to increase the demand in Nevada for workers with at least a modicum of postsecondary training in one or more STE M discipline. However, there is a problem. Even though many available opportunities require no more than the right community college certificate, insufficient numbers of Nevadans have pursued even a little STEM training. As a result, too few Nevadans are ready to participate in the state’s emerging STEM economy. The upshot: Without concerted action to prepare more Nevadans for jobs in STEM-intensive fields, skills shortages could limit growth in the state’s most promising target industries and Nevadans could miss out on employment that offers superior paths to opportunity and advancement. Which is the challenge this report addresses: Aimed at focusing the state at a critical moment, this analysis speaks to Nevada’s STEM challenge by providing a new assessment of Nevada’s STEM economy and labor market as well as a review of actions that leaders throughout the state—whether in the public, private, civic, or philanthropic sectors—can take to develop a workforce capable of supporting continued growth through economic diversification

Design study of a horizontal axis tidal turbine blade

Tidal current power generation offers a prospect of renewable energy which is predictable, and has lower CO2 emissions than traditional energy generation sources. It also has the potential to fulfil a significant part of the energy requirements of the UK and the rest of the world. The horizontal axis tidal turbine (HATT) acts as one of the means to convert the kinetic energy available in seawater into mechanical energy, and this research explores the hydrodynamics and the Computational Fluid Analysis (CFD) based design study of this. The first aim of this research was to develop a novel HATT blade shape through bio-mimicking a curved caudal fin shape to produce improved power coefficient. A second aim was to compare two different turbulence modelling techniques to enable the comparison of the power coefficients with the standard HATT models in tidal turbine blade literature. There were two types of numerical approaches used: The SST model and a more complex mathematical model, LES-Smagorinsky, to perform steady state and transient CFD analysis respectively on the designed blades using ANSYS CFX. The initial default HATT was designed, parameterised, and represented as a straight blade following to the standard HATT literature. The airfoil centres of the straight blade are built around the centreline, where the centreline acts as the master, and a novel third order polynomial function was integrated on the centreline to model the Blue Marlin fish caudal fin look-alike target shape. This approach was used to model the further 3 sets of curved blade shapes in percentage wise chord lengths. The CFD analysis of the two dimensional airfoils was conducted using ANSYS CFX, and compared against the literature. A further comparative analysis was performed with different mesh settings, and using the SST turbulence model. The comparative analysis formed an integral part of the CFD analysis to define the boundary conditions and the verification of the three dimensional CFD based HATT design study. The design strategy to move the curved blade backwards to the straight blade was also developed. The results obtained from the three dimensional comparative CFD analysis show good agreement between the two different turbulence modelling techniques used also producing an improved curved blade shape achieving the power coefficient of 0.5073% for SST simulations and 0.5178% for the LES-Smagorinsky CFD simulations. It is seen that LES-Smagorinsky CFD results produce slightly greater efficiency than the SST simulations, but the computational overhead required is massive. Finally, after comparing the improved efficiency of the bio-mimicked curved blade with the standard HATT models in the literature, it can proved that bio-mimicking the caudal fin look-alike blade produces a higher power coefficient than the standard HATT blade

A Unified Framework for Planning in Adversarial and Cooperative Environments

Users of AI systems may rely upon them to produce plans for achieving desired objectives. Such AI systems should be able to compute obfuscated plans whose execution in adversarial situations protects privacy, as well as legible plans which are easy for team members to understand in cooperative situations. We develop a unified framework that addresses these dual problems by computing plans with a desired level of comprehensibility from the point of view of a partially informed observer. For adversarial settings, our approach produces obfuscated plans with observations that are consistent with at least k goals from a set of decoy goals. By slightly varying our framework, we present an approach for goal legibility in cooperative settings which produces plans that achieve a goal while being consistent with at most j goals from a set of confounding goals. In addition, we show how the observability of the observer can be controlled to either obfuscate or clarify the next actions in a plan when the goal is known to the observer. We present theoretical results on the complexity analysis of our problems. We demonstrate the execution of obfuscated and legible plans in a cooking domain using a physical robot Fetch. We also provide an empirical evaluation to show the feasibility and usefulness of our approaches using IPC domains.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Retrospective analysis of prescriptions in the management of lepra reactions: Results of a single center study from tertiary hospital in Maharashtra

Objective: To examine pattern of lepra reaction andmedicines used in the treatment of lepra reactions in a tertiary hospital.Material methods: In this retrospective study, prescriptions of patients treated for the lepra reactions were reviewed to find out prevalence of type 1 and type 2 reactions and medicines used in the treatment of lepra reactions.Results:A total of66 patients (male 59.1%; female 40.9%) with mean age of 36.6 (+13.1) years were included in the study. Multibacillary leprosy was present in 93.7% patients.  A total of 39 (60%) patients had type 2 reaction whereas 26 (40%) had type 1 reaction. Mean number of medicines per patients was 7.5. Prednisolone was used in 62 (93.9%) patients with mean duration of 33.32 (+33.2) days whereas chloroquine was used in 52 (78.8%) patients for 36.6 (+27.9) days. Thalidomide was used in 25 (37.9%) patients. Analgesic and anti-inflammatory and anti-acidity drugs were used in 63 (95.4%) patients each whereas paracetamol was given to 41 (62.1%) patients. Antihistamine, antimicrobial agent and vitamins were given to 27 (40.9%), 27 (40.9%) and 35 (53.0%) patients respectively.Conclusion:Lepra 2 reaction is more common than lepra 1 reaction.  Prednisolone and chloroquine are the two most commonly used medicines in the treatment of lepra reaction. Similarly, thalidomide, older drug has emerged as common treatment for lepra reaction