Crew Resource Management Training Attitudes of United States Coast Guard Aviators

The purpose of this study is to compare the attitudes on Crew Resource Management practices of US Coast Guard enlisted flight crew members to those of pilots to determine if the current blended training is appropriate

Perceptions Regarding Public Safety in Portland’s King Neighborhood

The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is partnering with Portland State University (PSU) and neighborhood groups to develop new strategies for improving police-community relations and reducing crime. Our most recent initiative seeks to provide residents with greater voice in where PPB officers work in their neighborhood and what steps the City takes there to address public safety concerns. The King neighborhood in Northeast Portland was chosen as the starting point for this work following a recent gang related shooting at King School Park. Officers from North Precinct had already begun outreach to the community and they wanted additional input from the residents on how to best address public safety issues in the area. In October and November (2015) all known households in the King neighborhood were mailed a letter inviting the adult occupants to participate in an online survey. The survey covered three main topics: First, residents were asked to identify their top public safety concerns and locate these concerns on a map of the King neighborhood. Second, residents were asked whether they supported or opposed various actions the city might take in responding to these issues. A third set of questions were asked to establish baseline measurements for PPB’s ongoing efforts to reduce the fear of crime and improve police-community relationships. This report provides the findings from the King survey. The results will be used by PPB and other agencies to develop tailored community safety initiatives for the neighborhood

The client-side project manager: A practitioner of Design

SYNOPSISOur research adds to the client-side project management body of literature by demonstrating that these professionals display all the characteristics of Design Thinking Mentalities, Thinking Styles and Practices as identified by Hassi and Laakso (2011a) and that they utilize a broad range of the Design Thinking tools identified by Liedtka (2015) and Johansson-Sköldberg et al. (2013) when they deliver construction projects.RELEVANCE FOR PRACTICE/EDUCATIONOur findings indicate that client-side project managers should view their role differently to what has been traditionally accepted. The use of Design Thinking within the project management construct highlights that practitioners need to develop skills and tools that address, not just the compliance and control elements of project management, but also information gathering and problem solving techniques. This change of perspective creates opportunities for project managers to broaden their skill set in order to be able create further value in the Construction process.RESEARCH DESIGNOur research uses a Grounded Theory methodology to explore the ‘lived experience’ of client-side project managers to determine if they utilize Design Thinking when managing Construction projects. This is achieved by creating a framework from the work of Hassi and Laakso (2011a), Johansson-Sköldberg et al. (2013) and Liedtka (2015) to guide semi-structured interviews with a cohort of ten client-side project managers.MAIN FINDINGSOur research provides evidence of Design Thinking Mentalities, Thinking Styles, Practices and Tools being utilized by client-side project managers when delivering Construction projects. Our findings also identifies 15 project management tools used by client-side project managers when delivering Construction projects and highlight that the practice of client-side project management should not be viewed exclusively as part of the ‘Implementation’ process.RESEARCH IMPLICATIONSOur results support existing research on client-side project management and expand the Project Management body of literature by demonstrating how client-side project managers employ Design Thinking to handle poorly-defined projects

Public Perceptions Regarding the Use of Force by Police in Portland, Oregon

The current study sought to assess public perceptions regarding the frequency of force used by Portland police and determine whether these beliefs are consistent with officially recorded data on force used by officers in recent years

Profile Guided Dataflow Transformation for FPGAs and CPUs

This paper proposes a new high-level approach for optimising field programmable gate array (FPGA) designs. FPGA designs are commonly implemented in low-level hardware description languages (HDLs), which lack the abstractions necessary for identifying opportunities for significant performance improvements. Using a computer vision case study, we show that modelling computation with dataflow abstractions enables substantial restructuring of FPGA designs before lowering to the HDL level, and also improve CPU performance. Using the CPU transformations, runtime is reduced by 43 %. Using the FPGA transformations, clock frequency is increased from 67MHz to 110MHz. Our results outperform commercial low-level HDL optimisations, showcasing dataflow program abstraction as an amenable computation model for highly effective FPGA optimisation

RIPL: An Efficient Image Processing DSL for FPGAs

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can accelerate image processing by exploiting fine-grained parallelism opportunities in image operations. FPGA language designs are often subsets or extensions of existing languages, though these typically lack suitable hardware computation models so compiling them to FPGAs leads to inefficient designs. Moreover, these languages lack image processing domain specificity. Our solution is RIPL, an image processing domain specific language (DSL) for FPGAs. It has algorithmic skeletons to express image processing, and these are exploited to generate deep pipelines of highly concurrent and memory-efficient image processing components.Comment: Presented at Second International Workshop on FPGAs for Software Programmers (FSP 2015) (arXiv:1508.06320

The Age of Advancing PocketQube Technology

The PocketQube Standard (5cm cube) is a quickly advancing technology branch which can trace it origins back to the CubeSat standard. The community has grown from a handful of builders to in excess of 25 with most of the developments coming from Europe. Alba has pioneered standardized deployers called AlbaPods, capable of launching 6p and 96p worth of up mass. 9 PocketQubes are scheduled to launch in 2019 on two separate Alba Launch Clusters, offering the community an outlet to get to orbit regularly for the first time. In addition, Alba has developed the most advanced PocketQube in its class, Unicorn-2. Unicorn-2 can generate 20 watt peak, 10-15w OAP, 200kb/s downlink and 5 degrees pointing on a full ADCS

Public Perceptions of Crime Maps: Considering the Impact of Map Style on Perceptions of Safety

Presentation slides for a study that questions how people may interpret and understand the types of crime maps that are frequently publicly available. As public crime maps increase in use and distribution, researchers are beginning to explore the impacts of access

Power efficient dataflow design for a heterogeneous smart camera architecture

Visual attention modelling characterises the scene to segment regions of visual interest and is increasingly being used as a pre-processing step in many computer vision applications including surveillance and security. Smart camera architectures are an emerging technology and a foundation of security and safety frameworks in modern vision systems. In this paper, we present a dataflow design of a visual saliency based camera architecture targeting a heterogeneous CPU+FPGA platform to propose a smart camera network infrastructure. The proposed design flow encompasses image processing algorithm implementation, hardware & software integration and network connectivity through a unified model. By leveraging the properties of the dataflow paradigm, we iteratively refine the algorithm specification into a deployable solution, addressing distinct requirements at each design stage: from algorithm accuracy to hardware-software interactions, real-time execution and power consumption. Our design achieved real-time run time performance and the power consumption of the optimised asynchronous design is reported at only 0.25 Watt. The resource usages on a Xilinx Zynq platform remains significantly low

Profile driven dataflow optimisation of mean shift visual tracking

Profile guided optimisation is a common technique used by compilers and runtime systems to shorten execution runtimes and to optimise locality aware scheduling and memory access on heterogeneous hardware platforms. Some profiling tools trace the execution of low level code, whilst others are designed for abstract models of computation to provide rich domain-specific context in profiling reports. We have implemented mean shift, a computer vision tracking algorithm, in the RVC-CAL dataflow language and use both dynamic runtime and static dataflow profiling mechanisms to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in our naive initial version. We use these profiling reports to tune the CPU scheduler reducing runtime by 88%, and to optimise our dataflow implementation that reduces runtime by a further 43% - an overall runtime reduction of 93%. We also assess the portability of our mean shift optimisations by trading off CPU runtime against resource utilisation on FPGAs. Applying all dataflow optimisations reduces FPGA design space significantly, requiring fewer slice LUTs and less block memory