Towards sharing of data from accidents with chemicals

International audienceFor long, very large accidents occurred in plants where chemicals were processed and stored. Further, transportation and use of chemicals were at the origin of very severe accidents. The manufacture of explosives was certainly the first industry manufacturing chemicals in which very strict safety precautions were take

Le retour d'expérience

Dans l'avant propos de l'Archipel du danger, G.Y. Kervern et P. Rubise écrivent que "depuis le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne en 1755 et la polémique qui s'ensuit entre Voltaire et Rousseau sur la place de l'homme et de Dieu dans les catastrophes, l'homme s'est déclaré "Responsable du danger" passant donc d'un fatalisme résigné à un volontarisme moderne ouvrant la voie à la maîtrise du danger". Malgré des efforts croissants pour maîtriser le danger dont témoigne le développement de ces différentes sciences du danger -les cindyniques- dont nous avons eu des exemples variés pendant ces 3 jours, "l'être humain, conscient de ses limites, a rangé au placard le romantisme du zéro-risque et reconnaît même sportivement le besoin d'un certain danger pour se sentir exister". C'est au coeur de ce débat, entre la volonté de l'homme de maîtriser le danger et les limites de l'être humain , limites individuelles et collectives à le contrôler, qu'apparaît en toute évidence l'intérêt du "retour d'expérience" qu'on pourrait définir ainsi

Analyses d'accidents : une nécessité pour les analyses de danger et l'intervention en situation d'urgence ?

Lors d'accidents industriels mettant en jeu des explosions, des incendies ou des émissions de produits toxiques ou inflammables dans l'environnement, les effets à prendre en compte s'expriment en termes d'impulsions de pression, de projections de débris, de flux thermiques et de rejets de produits toxiques dans l'air, les eaux et les sols. Dans sa première partie, le présent article présente les conclusions consécutives à l'analyse de différents types d'accidents survenus en France et met en évidence l'absence de connaissances suffisantes sur le déroulement d'explosions non confinées ou partiellement confinées et sur les modalités d'émissions de produits toxiques lors d'incendies. La prise en considération de ces accidents et de bases de données sur les accidents permettra aux autorités compétentes, aux industriels, aux assureurs et aux centres techniques intéressés par ces questions de partager leurs expériences. La seconde partie aborde la validation des logiciels commerciaux de calcul des conséquences. La comparaison des résultats de l'examen des logiciels CAMEO 3.0, CHARM 6.1, PHAST 3.0 et TRACE 2.5.4. utilisés pour définir tout ou partie des effets mentionnés plus haut a permis de mettre en évidence la nécessité d'un protocole d'évaluation. Pour un tel protocole sont à retenir : la pertinence des modèles physiques, la convivialité pour l'utilisateur, le caractère adapté des bases de données et du manuel opérateur

Revisiting Matrix Product on Master-Worker Platforms

This paper is aimed at designing efficient parallel matrix-product algorithms for heterogeneous master-worker platforms. While matrix-product is well-understood for homogeneous 2D-arrays of processors (e.g., Cannon algorithm and ScaLAPACK outer product algorithm), there are three key hypotheses that render our work original and innovative: - Centralized data. We assume that all matrix files originate from, and must be returned to, the master. - Heterogeneous star-shaped platforms. We target fully heterogeneous platforms, where computational resources have different computing powers. - Limited memory. Because we investigate the parallelization of large problems, we cannot assume that full matrix panels can be stored in the worker memories and re-used for subsequent updates (as in ScaLAPACK). We have devised efficient algorithms for resource selection (deciding which workers to enroll) and communication ordering (both for input and result messages), and we report a set of numerical experiments on various platforms at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon and the University of Tennessee. However, we point out that in this first version of the report, experiments are limited to homogeneous platforms

Extreme set-up and run-up on steep cliffs (Banneg Island, France)

International audienceno abstrac

Human Daily Activities Indexing in Videos from Wearable Cameras for Monitoring of Patients with Dementia Diseases

Our research focuses on analysing human activities according to a known behaviorist scenario, in case of noisy and high dimensional collected data. The data come from the monitoring of patients with dementia diseases by wearable cameras. We define a structural model of video recordings based on a Hidden Markov Model. New spatio-temporal features, color features and localization features are proposed as observations. First results in recognition of activities are promising

Wearable video monitoring of people with age Dementia : Video indexing at the service of helthcare

International audienceExploration of video surveillance material for healthcare becomes a reality in medical research. In this paper we propose a video monitoring system with wearable cameras for early diagnostics of Dementia. A video acquisition set-up is designed and the methods are developed for indexing the recorded video. The noisiness of audio-visual material and its particularity yield challenging problems for automatic indexing of this content

Current situation and future prospects for beef production in Europe — A review

Publication history: Accepted - 26 April 2018; Published online - 24 May 2018.The European Union (EU) is the world’s third largest producer of beef. This contributes to the economy, rural development, social life, culture and gastronomy of Europe. The diversity of breeds, animal types (cows, bulls, steers, heifers) and farming systems (intensive, extensive on permanent or temporary pastures, mixed, breeders, feeders, etc) is a strength, and a weakness as the industry is often fragmented and poorly connected. There are also societal concerns regarding animal welfare and environmental issues, despite some positive environmental impacts of farming systems. The EU is amongst the most efficient for beef production as demonstrated by a relative low production of greenhouse gases. Due to regional differences in terms of climate, pasture availability, livestock practices and farms characteristics, productivity and incomes of beef producers vary widely across regions, being among the lowest of the agricultural systems. The beef industry is facing unprecedented challenges related to animal welfare, environmental impact, origin, authenticity, nutritional benefits and eating quality of beef. These may affect the whole industry, especially its farmers. It is therefore essential to bring the beef industry together to spread best practice and better exploit research to maintain and develop an economically viable and sustainable beef industry. Meeting consumers’ expectations may be achieved by a better prediction of beef palatability using a modelling approach, such as in Australia. There is a need for accurate information and dissemination on the benefits and issues of beef for human health and for environmental impact. A better objective description of goods and services derived from livestock farming is also required. Putting into practice “agroecology” and organic farming principles are other potential avenues for the future. Different future scenarios can be written depending on the major driving forces, notably meat consumption, climate change, environmental policies and future organization of the supply chain

The IMMED Project: Wearable Video Monitoring of People with Age Dementia

International audienceIn this paper, we describe a new application for multimedia indexing, using a system that monitors the instrumental activities of daily living to assess the cognitive decline caused by dementia. The system is composed of a wearable camera device designed to capture audio and video data of the instrumental activities of a patient, which is leveraged with multimedia indexing techniques in order to allow medical specialists to analyze several hour long observation shots efficiently

Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model in Detecting Activities of Daily Living in Wearable Videos for Studies of Dementia

International audienceThis paper presents a method for indexing activities of daily living in videos obtained from wearable cameras. In the context of dementia diagnosis by doctors, the videos are recorded at patients' houses and later visualized by the medical practitioners. The videos may last up to two hours, therefore a tool for an efficient navigation in terms of activities of interest is crucial for the doctors. The specific recording mode provides video data which are really difficult, being a single sequence shot where strong motion and sharp lighting changes often appear. Our work introduces an automatic motion based segmentation of the video and a video structuring approach in terms of activities by a hierarchical two-level Hidden Markov Model. We define our description space over motion and visual characteristics of video and audio channels. Experiments on real data obtained from the recording at home of several patients show the difficulty of the task and the promising results of our approach