QKD in Standard Optical Telecommunications Networks

To perform Quantum Key Distribution, the mastering of the extremely weak signals carried by the quantum channel is required. Transporting these signals without disturbance is customarily done by isolating the quantum channel from any noise sources using a dedicated physical channel. However, to really profit from this technology, a full integration with conventional network technologies would be highly desirable. Trying to use single photon signals with others that carry an average power many orders of magnitude bigger while sharing as much infrastructure with a conventional network as possible brings obvious problems. The purpose of the present paper is to report our efforts in researching the limits of the integration of QKD in modern optical networks scenarios. We have built a full metropolitan area network testbed comprising a backbone and an access network. The emphasis is put in using as much as possible the same industrial grade technology that is actually used in already installed networks, in order to understand the throughput, limits and cost of deploying QKD in a real network

The complex high order Toda lattice and polynomials generated by three term recurrence relations

Se estudia la relación entre redes de Toda y sucesiones de polinomios dados por recuurencias a tres término

MIRACLE’s hybrid approach to bilingual and monolingual Information Retrieval

The main goal of the bilingual and monolingual participation of the MIRACLE team at CLEF 2004 was testing the effect of combination approaches to information retrieval. The starting point is a set of basic components: stemming, transformation, filtering, generation of n-grams, weighting and relevance feedback. Some of these basic components are used in different combinations and order of application for document indexing and for query processing. Besides this, a second order combination is done, mainly by averaging or by selective combination of the documents retrieved by different approaches for a particular query

Reusing Human Resources Management Standards for Employment Services

Employment Services (ESs) are becoming more and more important for Public Administrations where their social implications on sustainability, workforce mobility and equal opportunities play a fundamental strategic importance for any central or local Government. The EU SEEMP project aims at improving facilitate workers mobility in Europe. Ontologies are used to model descriptions of job offers and curricula; and for facilitating the process of exchanging job offer data and CV data between ES. In this paper we present the methodological approach we followed for reusing existing human resources management standards in the SEEMP project, in order to build a common “language” called Reference Ontology

miraQA: Initial experiments in Question Answering

We present the miraQA system that constitutes MIRACLE first experience in Question Answering for monolingual Spanish and has been developed for QA@CLEF 2004. The architecture of the system is described and details of our approach to Statistical Answer Extraction based on Hidden Markov Models are presented. One run that uses last year question set for training purposes has been submitted. The results are presented together with ideas for improvement

Hyperspectral Imaging for Peach Ripening Assessment

The present research is focused on the application of artificial vision to peach ripening assessment, avoiding multiplicative and additive effect. Original images were acquired with a hyperspectral camera. Vision allows a spatially detailed determination of the ripening stage of the fruit. Optical indexes are proposed, based on the combination of wavelengths close to the chlorophyll absorption peak at 680 nm. Ind1 corresponds approximately to the depth of the absorption peak, and Ind2 corresponds to the relative absorption peak. An artificial image of each index was obtained by computing the corresponding reflectance images. Score images have been also computed from Principal Components and Partial Least Squares Analysis. In any case the best performances correspond to such images that correct multiplicative and additive effects. Ind2 is the preferred index; it showed the highest discriminating power between ripening stages and no influence of convexity. Ind2 also allowed the differentiation of ripening regions within the fruits, and it showed the evolution of those regions during ripening. This fact has been also observed in some of the score image

Reactive nitrogen in the Spanish agri-food sector: environmental impact on atmosphere, soils, water and resources.

The presence of reactive species of nitrogen (N) in the biosphere might cause environmental impacts at local, regional and global scales. Nowadays the N flows generated by human activities greatly exceed natural processes, thus a necessity exists of identifying and quantifying the current state of environmental N loads. The aim of this work is to quantify the amount of reactive N used in the Spanish agri-food sector, assessing the related potential environmental impacts and potential uses of resources. Data from a previously calculated N flow analysis in the Spanish agricultural and food production system for the 1996-2000 time period were used. Total anthropogenic N inputs to the systems were calculated. Input and output flows were considered in each economic compartment in order to calculate use efficiency (ratio of useful outputs to total inputs), eco-efficiency (ratio of useful outputs to outputs to the environment) and recycling rate (ratio of flow recycled to an earlier life-cycle compartment divided by total outputs). Environmental impacts were assessed by quantifying the N balance between the economic and the environmental subsystems: water, atmosphere, ecosystems soils and other soils. In this case agricultural soils were also considered an environmental compartment, since they are an important intermediate path to the environment. The impact on resources was evaluated considering the net N imports into the system and legume fixing crops, pastures and forages versus feed and fertilizers within the system. Anthropogenic N inputs are relatively high in Spain, which is a net importer of nitrogen, mainly in fertilizers and food and feed commodities. Environmental compartments receive relative high amounts of reactive nitrogen, especially soils. Furthermore, there was a relative low use of domestic resources, with a low proportion of N recycled within the system

MIRACLE-FI at ImageCLEFphoto 2008: Experiences in merging text-based and content-based retrievals

This paper describes the participation of the MIRACLE consortium at the ImageCLEF Photographic Retrieval task of ImageCLEF 2008. In this is new participation of the group, our first purpose is to evaluate our own tools for text-based retrieval and for content-based retrieval using different similarity metrics and the aggregation OWA operator to fuse the three topic images. From the MIRACLE last year experience, we implemented a new merging module combining the text-based and the content-based information in three different ways: FILTER-N, ENRICH and TEXT-FILTER. The former approaches try to improve the text-based baseline results using the content-based results lists. The last one was used to select the relevant images to the content-based module. No clustering strategies were analyzed. Finally, 41 runs were submitted: 1 for the text-based baseline, 10 content-based runs, and 30 mixed experiments merging text and content-based results. Results in general can be considered nearly acceptable comparing with the best results of other groups. Obtained results from textbased retrieval are better than content-based. Merging both textual and visual retrieval we improve the text-based baseline when applying the ENRICH merging algorithm although visual results are lower than textual ones. From these results we were going to try to improve merged results by clustering methods applied to this image collection

Trajectory Reconstruction Techniques for Evaluation of ATC Systems

This paper is focused on trajectory reconstruction techniques for evaluating ATC systems, using real data of recorded opportunity traffic. We analyze different alternatives for this problem, from traditional interpolation approaches based on curve fitting to our proposed schemes based on modeling regular motion patterns with optimal smoothers. The extraction of trajectory features such as motion type (or mode of flight), maneuvers profile, geometric parameters, etc., allows a more accurate computation of the curve and the detailed evaluation of the data processors used in the ATC centre. Different alternatives will be compared with some performance results obtained with simulated and real data sets

Ice volume changes of Ariebreen, Spitsbergen, during 1936-1990-2007

Ariebreen (77º 01' N, 15º 29' E) is a small valley glacier (ca. 0.36 km2 in August 2007) located at Hornsund, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, ca. 2.5 km to the west of Hornsund Polish Polar Station. Many Svalbard glaciers have experienced a significant recession at least since the 1930s, and most likely since the end of Little Ice Age in the early 20th century (Werner, 1993). It has manifested as thinning and retreating of ice fronts, though a simultaneous thickening at the uppermost elevations in many locations has been reported (Bamber et al., 2004; Nuth et al., 2007). Moreover, the thinning rate of western Svalbard glaciers has shown an acceleration during the most recent decades (Kohler et al., 2007). The main aims of this contribution are to determine whether Ariebreen follows such retreat pattern and to quantify the retreat it has experienced, in terms of area, thickness and volume changes, to estimate the average mass balance equivalent to the ice volume change during the period under investigation, and to estimate the volume of ice presently stored in Ariebreen. The main tools to accomplish this will be the analysis of digital terrain models (DTM) of the glacier surface corresponding to different dates, and the radio-echo sounding of the ice body to determine the present ice volume. The latter is described in a separate contribution to this workshop (Navarro et al., 2008)