Suchergebnisse

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for automatic target classification (automatic target recognition (ATR)) have attracted significant interest as they can be acquired day and night under a wide range of weather conditions. However, SAR images can be time consuming to analyse, even for experts. ATR can alleviate this burden and deep learning is an attractive solution. A new deep learning Pose-informed architecture solution, that takes into account the impact of target orientation on the SAR image as the scatterers configuration changes, is proposed. The classification is achieved in two stages. First, the orientation of the target is determined using a Hough transform and a convolutional neural network (CNN). Then, classification is achieved with a CNN specifically trained on targets with similar orientations to the target under test. The networks are trained with translation and SAR-specific data augmentation. The proposed Pose-informed deep network architecture was successfully tested on the Military Ground Target Dataset (MGTD) and the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) datasets. Results show the proposed solution outperformed standard AlexNets on the MGTD, MSTAR extended operating condition (EOC)1, EOC2 and standard operating condition (SOC)10 datasets with a score of 99.13% on the MSTAR SOC10.

This work analyzes the trade data of the three major hubs of the Western US electricity markets – SP-15, Palo Verde, and Mid-C -, proposing the reconstruction and the organization of a new complete dataset of the daily time series of the electricity prices for the years 2001-2017. They are examined Enron operations and the main regulations and policy measures adopted in the American financial markets, before, during, and after the California crisis of 2000-2001, through a normative and a statistical analysis of the electricity prices. The objectives are to verify the existence of a relationship amongst price volatility and manipulative phenomena, and to test the effectiveness of the regulative policies applied. The results suggest a significant role played by Enron operations in the increase of the episodes and intensity of the volatility of the electricity prices in California and validate the hypothesis of a regulator capture. Questo lavoro analizza i trade data dei tre hubs principali dei mercati elettrici occidentali USA – SP-15, Palo Verde e Mid-C –, proponendo la costruzione e l'organizzazione di un nuovo dataset completo delle serie temporali giornaliere dei prezzi elettrici per gli anni 2001-2017. Si esaminano le operazioni Enron e le principali regolamentazioni e misure di policy adottate nei mercati finanziari americani prima, durante e dopo la crisi californiana del 2000-2001, attraverso un'analisi normativa e statistica dei prezzi elettrici. Gli obiettivi sono di verificare l'esistenza di una relazione tra volatilità dei prezzi e fenomeni manipolativi, e testare l'efficacia delle politiche regolative applicate. I risultati suggeriscono un ruolo significativo delle operazioni Enron nell'aumento di episodi e dell'intensità della volatilità dei prezzi elettrici in California e avvalorano l'ipotesi di una cattura del regolatore.

Although e-government practice in Malaysia shows considerable progress, accessibility of the government websites has been cited as the next key concern that deserves further attention.It is therefore essential to ensure greater compliance of the government websites with established web accessibility standards and guidelines. This is in line with an initiative to promote better delivery system of the government.In response, this paper reports accessibility status of 25 Malaysian ministries websites as outlined in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) and United States Rehabilitation Act 1973 (Section 508). Using AChecker and WAVE as automated accessibility evaluation tools, the results suggest relatively low compliance of the standards amongst the ministries websites examined.Further improvements are recommended, particularly on the contrast view requirement as well as the use of input and image-related elements.The report can be a meaningful guidance for webmasters to locate and address the errors accordingly.Fully complying with the stipulated guidelines, therefore, ensures equal experience among citizen on accessing government related information and services.

The insufficient broadband enabled-services in the rural areas have been identified among the reasons that prolong the behaviour of rural dwellers on the use of low-band internet while government agencies have started initiations to increase the use of broadband in the rural area.However, previous studies have failed to identify the roles played by antecedents of broadband user behavioural intention in the rural communities. Thus, this research investigates roles of some antecedents of broadband user behavioural intention in the rural areas by adapting UTAUT model.A quantitative research approach was employed by engaging 1,730 participants from 40 villages who are secondary school students that are living in rural areas of northern region of Malaysia.The result reveals that performance expectancy, effort expectancy and compatibility have large effect on broadband user behavioural intention in the rural areas, while social influence recorded medium effect.This implies that all the identified factors may help in determining the behavioural intention of users of broadband in the rural areas.

Recently, Indonesia has more than 3.000 Higher Education Institutions, 300.000 lecturers, and 7.8 million higher education students. To handle those numerous stakeholders, Directorate General Higher Education Indonesia Government (DGHEI - as the regulator of higher education institutions) has been developed several websites as Information Systems (IS). The developed information system was used to manage information that attached on the stakeholders entities. Those information entities were projected for open public data access. In other hand, the Information Systems that offered by DGHEI are not only single information system. But also several information system that not integrated yet become single portal. Moreover, DGHEI regulates lecturers to upload their entities such as portfolios and other supporting documents developed IS's. However, this will be cause a time consuming, repetition activities and data redundant. Those problems are called administrative problems. In the meantime, our current development Lecturer Based Supportive Tool (LBST) has been developed as lecturer assistance to enrich learning materials on limited bandwidth condition. This paper discusses the use of LBST as Data Provider to solve the administrative problems that has been occurred in Indonesia higher education environments. Instead of uploading into DGHEI information systems, lecturers eager to use LBST as an alternative systems that offered by DGHEI. As a result, LBST could be driven into data provider that provides information that needed by DGHEI or other data customers.

Africa had a late start in the race to setting up and obtaining universities with research quality fundamentals. According to Mamdani [5], the first colonial universities were few and far between: Makerere in East Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa. This last place in the race, compared to other continents, has had tremendous implications in the development plans for the continent. For Africa, the race has been difficult from a late start to an insurmountable litany of problems that include difficulty in equipment acquisition, lack of capacity, limited research and development resources and lack of investments in local universities. In fact most of these universities are very recent with many less than 50 years in business except a few. To help reduce the labor costs incurred by the colonial masters of shipping Europeans to Africa to do mere clerical jobs, they started training ―workshops‖ calling them technical or business colleges. According to Mamdani, meeting colonial needs was to be achieved while avoiding the ―Indian disease‖ in Africa -- that is, the development of an educated middle class, a group most likely to carry the virus of nationalism. Upon independence, most of these ―workshops‖ were turned into national ―universities‖, but with no clear role in national development. These national ―universities‖ were catering for children of the new African political elites. Through the seventies and eighties, most African universities were still without development agendas and were still doing business as usual. Meanwhile, governments strapped with lack of money saw no need of putting more scarce resources into big white elephants. By mid-eighties, even the UN and IMF were calling for a limit on funding African universities. In today's African university, the traditional curiosity driven research model has been replaced by a market-driven model dominated by a consultancy culture according to Mamdani (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). The prevailing research culture as intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity, seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels and workshop attendance going with transport allowances and per diems (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). There is need to remedy this situation and that is the focus of this paper.

Individuals carrying guns, knives and other weapon type metal objects are a threat to general public safety and thus the detection of such weapons is a priority in airports, schools and military checkpoints etc. Conventional metal detectors and image scanners, typically, are unable to distinguish between different types of threat and non-threat metal objects and or lack the ability to detect threat items in large areas. The accurate and fast detection of threat metal objects in a crowded open area environment is the aim of this work. The optimum design of transmitter and receiver coils, which are arranged in an array structure, is an important aspect of an effective large area metal detection system. Transmitter and receiver coils arrays, proposed in this paper, reduce the occurrence of hotspots (area of high sensitivity) or dead zones (area of low sensitivity) and have been modelled and analysed in Opera 3D electromagnetic simulation software. The results are being used to build a multi- zone transmitter and receiver coil array for large open area concealed weapon detection system. Thus, the system is expected to be suited for use in corridor entrances in airports, apartments, schools, colleges and military checkpoints etc.

This project was supported by the Max Planck Society and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MiTopMat, grant agreement no. 715730). M.D.B. and P.H.M. acknowledge EPSRC for PhD studentship support through grant number EP/L015110/1. Research in Dresden benefits from the environment of the Excellence Cluster ct.qmat. A.S. acknowledges support from an ARCS Foundation Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. A.S. would thanks Z. Gomez and E. Huang for helpful discussions and T. Devereaux for letting us use his group cluster. Computational work was performed on the Sherlock cluster at Stanford University and on resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supported by the DOE under contract DE_AC02-05CH11231. T.S. acknowledges support from the Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems initiative of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), in particular the Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2020-05842), Accelerator Supplement (RGPAS-2020-00060) and Discovery Launch Supplement (DGECR-2020-00222). T.S. contributed to this work prior to joining AWS. D.G.-G.'s and A.W.B.'s involvement in calculations was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. E.Z. and M.M. thank the International Max Planck Research School for Chemistry and Physics of Quantum Materials (IMPRS-CPQM) for financial support. G.B. and D.A.B. acknowledge support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2018-04280) and from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. ; In an idealized infinite crystal, the material properties are constrained by the symmetries of the unit cell. The point-group symmetry is broken by the sample shape of any finite ...

The degradation of metallic industrial assets, equipment, and components costs governments, industries, and citizens billions of dollars a year. Also, the degradation of industrial assets and infrastructure proliferates myriad safety problems. AssessLIFE software addresses this strategic deficiency by focusing on forecasting strategies rather than on mitigation strategies in the active battle against industrial asset degradation. By employing tested and proven scientific analytical computations, forecasting, prediction, and analytics, the AssessLIFE software plans to significantly reduce the billions of dollars expended via inspection, treatment, and repair of degradation-prone assets and infrastructure. The AssessLIFE software leverages many scientific studies and research in many fields of engineering. The AssessLIFE software also emphasizes the computerization or automation of the processes of metallic (alloys and welds) degradation mechanisms and parameters using digital techniques.

DMR was supported by the UK EPSRC Grant No. EP/L015110/1. EMG acknowledges support from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Scottish Government and UK EPSRC Grant No. EP/T007214/1. NW wishes to acknowledge financial support from UK EPSRC Grant No. EP/R513222/1 and EP/R030413/1. ; Systems of interacting charges and fields are ubiquitous in physics. Recently, it has been shown that Hamiltonians derived using different gauges can yield different physical results when matter degrees of freedom are truncated to a few low-lying energy eigenstates. This effect is particularly prominent in the ultra-strong coupling regime. Such ambiguities arise because transformations reshuffle the partition between light and matter degrees of freedom and so level truncation is a gauge dependent approximation. To avoid this gauge ambiguity, we redefine the electromagnetic fields in terms of potentials for which the resulting canonical momenta and Hamiltonian are explicitly unchanged by the gauge choice of this theory. Instead the light/matter partition is assigned by the intuitive choice of separating an electric field between displacement and polarisation contributions. This approach is an attractive choice in typical cavity quantum electrodynamics situations. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

Funding: European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Future and Emerging Technologies Open grant agreement Super-pixels No 829116. ; The field of optical metrology with its high precision position, rotation and wavefront sensors represents the basis for lithography and high resolution microscopy. However, the on-chip integration a task highly relevant for future nanotechnological devices necessitates the reduction of the spatial footprint of sensing schemes by the deployment of novel concepts. A promising route towards thisgoal is predicated on the controllable directional emission of the fundamentally smallest emitters of light, i.e. dipoles, as an indicator. Here we realize an integrated displacement sensor based on the directional emission of Huygens dipoles excited in an individual dipolar antenna. The position of the antenna relative to the excitation field determines its directional coupling into a six-way crossing of photonic crystal waveguides. In our experimental study supported by theoretical calculations, we demonstrate the first prototype of an integrated displacement sensor with a standard deviation of the position accuracy below λ=300 at room temperature and ambient conditions. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework (ERC Grant Agreement No. 615613). B.L. and K.L. acknowledge support from DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) within CRC787. D.S. acknowledges support from DFG within GRK1558. ; Synchronization of coupled oscillators at the transition between classical physics and quantum physics has become an emerging research topic at the crossroads of nonlinear dynamics and nanophotonics. We study this unexplored field by using quantum dot microlasers as optical oscillators. Operating in the regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) with an intracavity photon number on the order of 10 and output powers in the 100 nW range, these devices have high β-factors associated with enhanced spontaneous emission noise. We identify synchronization of mutually coupled microlasers via frequency locking associated with a sub-gigahertz locking range. A theoretical analysis of the coupling behavior reveals striking differences from optical synchronization in the classical domain with negligible spontaneous emission noise. Beyond that, additional self-feedback leads to zero-lag synchronization of coupled microlasers at ultra-low light levels. Our work has high potential to pave the way for future experiments in the quantum regime of synchronization. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

A cyber policy can always be at an efficacy with the robust implementation of Information Technology Governance (ITG). Analysing the linkages that may exist between ITG and Information Technology Governance (ITG), together with the benefits of theorising scaling and scalability in such derivation is desirable in other to support decision making and identify framework impediments to implementing cyber policy in the SME Aviation. In this paper, we define the term cyber policy, discusses ITG and MSGS (a framework for cyber policy). We clarify the framework for cyber policy (including major reviews, strategic elements, and benefits of the cyber policymaking to different stakeholders). We also explore impediments to cyber policy implementation, evaluates frameworks and models on cyber policy implementation approaches with SME Aviation and justifies the need for secondary data in researching with the rising issues. We posited that when ITG and business policy aligned to entail lack of awareness of global and local threats to cybersecurity, inadequate security infrastructures and the need for more experts involved in decision making, there is the need for a new approach to cyber policy implementation for robust competitiveness

The improvement of MSMEs export performance is one of the government's efforts to improve the economy of the community. Increased export performance is done by monitoring and controlling the amount of exports. the problem faced in determining the amount of exports is the difficulty of calculating the stock, capacity, and competition among MSMEs in influencing the amount of stock. The right amount will minimize the loss from the MSMEs side. This study uses export data of wood and other forest product sub-sector, that is commodity furniture. Fuzzy method in some study can give optimal result. This study compares two methods to determine the effectiveness of products that benefit MSMEs. This study examines the effectiveness of Fuzzy Mamdani and Fuzzy Tsukamoto methods on market matching process. Based on this study, Fuzzy Mamdani gives a better performance than fuzzy Tsukamoto with the accuracy system is MAPE=6.49%