Latency Performance for Real-Time Audio on BeagleBone Black

In this paper we present a set of tests aimed at evaluating the responsiveness of a BeagleBone Black board in real-time interactive audio applications. The default Angstrom Linux distribution was tested without modifying the underlying kernel. Latency measurements and audio quality were compared across the combination of different audio interfaces and audio synthesis models. Data analysis shows that the board is generally characterised by a remarkably high responsiveness; most of the tested configurations are affected by less than 7ms of latency and under-run activity proved to be contained using the correct optimisation techniques

Data management technologies in LHC Computing Grid

Performance, reliability and scalability in data management are cornerstones in the context of the computing Grid, where the volumes of data to be moved are huge, and the data analysis must be supported by high-performance and scalable storage resources. Nowadays, the data management issues are particularly important, considering the large data size and I/O load that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is going to produce. The Enabling Grids for Enabling e-Science (EGEE) EU funded project, where the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) is a key member, is responsible to release and maintain the currently world’s largest production grid, a sophisticated hierarchy of data management and storage tools developed to help physicist, but also other scientific communities, in the face of distributed data management problems. This paper reviews the main technologies employed for storage and data management in EGEE, and in the associated Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project

Design and use of a hackable digital instrument

This paper introduces the D-Box, a new digital musical instrument specifically designed to elicit unexpected creative uses and to support modification by the performer. Rather than taking a modular approach, the D-Box is a hackable instrument which allows for the discovery of novel working configurations through circuit bending techniques. Starting from the concept of appropriation, this paper describes the design, development and evaluation process lasting more than one year and made in collaboration with musicians and hackers.This work was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant EP/K032046/1 (2013-14)

Wadi Qattarah Dams Case History

Two earthfill dams were constructed on the Wadi Qattarah in Libya between 1969 and 1972 but the filling was never ach1eved for both dams. After a partial filling well below normal water level, Secondary Dam failed in December 1977. Several weaknesses may be found in the features of both dams and have been analyzed by the authors on the basis of dam instrumentation results, measurements and observations of the Secondary Dam failure. Several possible causes of failure of this dam are presented. No one can however be taken as certain. The series of events as reported by eye witnesses appear to point out a typical phenomenon of piping, but the responsible mechanism can be attributed to var1ous causes

StoRM: A Manager for Storage Resource in Grid

Nowadays, data intensive applications demand high-performance and large-storage systems capable of serving up to various Petabytes of storage space. Therefore, common solutions adopted in data centres include Storage Area Networks (SAN) and cluster parallel file systems, such as GPFS from IBM and Lustre from Sun Microsystems. In order to make these storage system solutions available in modern Data Grid architectures, standard interfaces are needed. The Grid Storage Resource Manager (SRM) interface is one of these standard interfaces. Grid storage services implementing the SRM standard provide common capabilities and advanced functionality such as dynamic space allocation and file management on shared storage systems. In this paper, we describe StoRM (STOrage Resource Manager). StoRM is a flexible and high-performing implementation of the standard SRM interface version 2.2. The software architecture of StoRM allows for an easy integration to different underlying storage systems via a plug-in mechanism. In particular, StoRM takes advantage from storage systems based on cluster file systems. Currently, StoRM is installed and used in production in various data centres, including the WLCG Italian Tier-1. In addition, Economics and Financial communities, as represented by the EGRID Project, adopt StoRM in production as well

An extended two-dimensional vocal tract model for fast acoustic simulation of single-axis symmetric three-dimensional tubes

The simulation of two-dimensional (2D) wave propagation is an affordable computational task and its use can potentially improve time performance in vocal tracts' acoustic analysis. Several models have been designed that rely on 2D wave solvers and include 2D representations of three-dimensional (3D) vocal tract-like geometries. However, until now, only the acoustics of straight 3D tubes with circular cross-sections have been successfully replicated with this approach. Furthermore, the simulation of the resulting 2D shapes requires extremely high spatio-temporal resolutions, dramatically reducing the speed boost deriving from the usage of a 2D wave solver. In this paper, we introduce an in-progress novel vocal tract model that extends the 2D Finite-Difference Time-Domain wave solver (2.5D FDTD) by adding tube depth, derived from the area functions, to the acoustic solver. The model combines the speed of a light 2D numerical scheme with the ability to natively simulate 3D tubes that are symmetric in one dimension, hence relaxing previous resolution requirements. An implementation of the 2.5D FDTD is presented, along with evaluation of its performance in the case of static vowel modeling. The paper discusses the current features and limits of the approach, and the potential impact on computational acoustics applications.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Interspeech 2019 submissio

L'evoluzione della programmazione commerciale in Emilia Romagna

The regulation of retail activities in Emilia Romagna Region has been characterized by three main phases. The first one starts with the approval of an Act in 1971, which aimed at supporting local authorities to realize and implement “plans” for the development of the retail local networks. The second one is related to the attempt of regulating the commercial development with programs and plans concerning aggregations of municipalities, after considering the poor effect of the regulation at the local level. During the third phase, starting with the reform of retail activities in 1998, the governance of commercial activities becomes mainly a concern of the large-scale plans, first of the Piani Territoriali di Coordinamento Provinciale (PTCP), realized and implemented by the Provincie.La regulación de las actividades comerciales minoristas en la Región de la Emilia Romagna ha estado caracterizada por tres momentos significativos. El primero comienza con la aprobación de la Ley del 11 de Junio de 1971, nº 426; la cual propone a las autoridades locales realizar e implementar planes para el desarrollo de los marcos del comercio minorista local. El segundo discurre en el transcurso de los años 80 y está relacionado con el intento de regular el desarrollo comercial con programas y planes supramunicipales, después de considerar el pobre efecto de la regulación a nivel local. Durante la tercera fase, que comienza con la reforma de las actividades comerciales en 1998, se promueve una programación comercial de amplia escala, estrechamente conectada con el Plan Territorial de Coordinación Provincial (PTCP)

Integrazione e validazione di OMNeT++ e Gazebo per sistemi multi-robot mediante un caso d'uso

Sistemi multi-robot a mobilità autonoma necessitano di simulatori che simulino in maniera accurata entrambi gli aspetti di gestione della rete di comunicazione e interazione dei robot con l'ambiente. Strumenti di questi tipo si ricavano dall'integrazione di simulatori specializzati nella simulazione di un singolo aspetto. In questa tesi viene descritta la realizzazione di un sistema integrato formato dall'unione di OMNeT++ e Gazebo. Il sistema viene quindi validato mediante un caso d'uso, una forma di mobilità basata sulle molle virtuali. Uno sciame di droni, connesso dalle molle virtuali, viene condotto da un drone leader in un ambiente cittadino. Dato che tale ambiente presenta degli ostacoli, i droni sono equipaggiati con sensori di prossimità allo scopo di evitare collisioni, prendendo decisioni su come muoversi per evitare l'ostacolo utilizzando anche qui le molle virtuali. Viene quindi valutata tale forma di mobilità

Progetto di reti Sensori Wireless e tecniche di Fusione Sensoriale

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) envisions a world where smart, electronic environments are aware and responsive to their context. People moving into these settings engage many computational devices and systems simultaneously even if they are not aware of their presence. AmI stems from the convergence of three key technologies: ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication and natural interfaces. The dependence on a large amount of fixed and mobile sensors embedded into the environment makes of Wireless Sensor Networks one of the most relevant enabling technologies for AmI. WSN are complex systems made up of a number of sensor nodes, simple devices that typically embed a low power computational unit (microcontrollers, FPGAs etc.), a wireless communication unit, one or more sensors and a some form of energy supply (either batteries or energy scavenger modules). Low-cost, low-computational power, low energy consumption and small size are characteristics that must be taken into consideration when designing and dealing with WSNs. In order to handle the large amount of data generated by a WSN several multi sensor data fusion techniques have been developed. The aim of multisensor data fusion is to combine data to achieve better accuracy and inferences than could be achieved by the use of a single sensor alone. In this dissertation we present our results in building several AmI applications suitable for a WSN implementation. The work can be divided into two main areas: Multimodal Surveillance and Activity Recognition. Novel techniques to handle data from a network of low-cost, low-power Pyroelectric InfraRed (PIR) sensors are presented. Such techniques allow the detection of the number of people moving in the environment, their direction of movement and their position. We discuss how a mesh of PIR sensors can be integrated with a video surveillance system to increase its performance in people tracking. Furthermore we embed a PIR sensor within the design of a Wireless Video Sensor Node (WVSN) to extend its lifetime. Activity recognition is a fundamental block in natural interfaces. A challenging objective is to design an activity recognition system that is able to exploit a redundant but unreliable WSN. We present our activity in building a novel activity recognition architecture for such a dynamic system. The architecture has a hierarchical structure where simple nodes performs gesture classification and a high level meta classifiers fuses a changing number of classifier outputs. We demonstrate the benefit of such architecture in terms of increased recognition performance, and fault and noise robustness. Furthermore we show how we can extend network lifetime by performing a performance-power trade-off. Smart objects can enhance user experience within smart environments. We present our work in extending the capabilities of the Smart Micrel Cube (SMCube), a smart object used as tangible interface within a tangible computing framework, through the development of a gesture recognition algorithm suitable for this limited computational power device. Finally the development of activity recognition techniques can greatly benefit from the availability of shared dataset. We report our experience in building a dataset for activity recognition. Such dataset is freely available to the scientific community for research purposes and can be used as a testbench for developing, testing and comparing different activity recognition techniques