Live 3D shape reconstruction, recognition and registration

We present a video-based system which interactively captures the geometry of a 3D object in the form of a point cloud, then recognizes and registers known objects in this point cloud in a matter of seconds (fig. 1). In order to achieve interactive speed, we exploit both efficient inference algorithms and parallel computation, often on a GPU. The system can be broken down into two distinct phases: geometry capture, and object inference. We now discuss these in further detail. © 2011 IEEE.

Changing employment relation systems in Japan:cases of the Mitsubishi Chemical Group and the Federation of Shinkin Banks

Over the past decade or so a number of changes have been observed in traditional Japanese employment relations (ERs) systems such as an increase in non-regular workers, a move towards performance-based systems and a continuous decline in union membership. There is a large body of Anglo-Saxon and Japanese literature providing evidence that national factors such as national institutions, national culture, and the business and economic environment have significantly influenced what were hitherto three ‘sacred’ aspects of Japanese ERs systems (ERSs). However, no research has been undertaken until now at the firm level regarding the extent to which changes in national factors influence ERSs across firms. This article develops a model to examine the impact of national factors on ER systems; and analyses the impact of national factors at the firm level ER systems. Based on information collected from two different groups of companies, namely Mitsubishi Chemical Group (MCG) and Federation of Shinkin Bank (FSB) the research finds that except for a few similarities, the impact of national factors is different on Japanese ER systems at the firm level. This indicates that the impact of national factors varies in the implementation of employment relations factors. In the case of MCG, national culture has less to do with seniority-based system. Study also reveals that the national culture factors have also less influence on an enterprise-based system in the case of FSB. This analysis is useful for domestic and international organizations as it helps to better understand the role of national factors in determining Japanese ERSs.

Forging futures? Engineering in the primary school curriculum

Starting with the research question, "How can the Primary School Curriculum be developed so as to spark Children's Engineering Imaginations from an early age?" this paper sets out to critically analyse the issues around embedding Engineering in the Primary School Curriculum from the age of 5 years. Findings from an exploratory research project suggest that in order to promote the concept of Engineering Education to potential university students (and in doing so begin to address issues around recruitment / retention within Engineering) there is a real need to excite and engage children with the subject from a young age. Indeed, it may be argued that within today's digital society, the need to encourage children to engage with Engineering is vital to the future sustainable development of our society. Whilst UK Government policy documents highlight the value of embedding Engineering into the school curriculum there is little or no evidence to suggest that Engineering has been successfully embedded into the elementary level school curriculum. Building on the emergent findings of the first stage of a longitudinal study, this paper concludes by arguing that Engineering could be embedded into the curriculum through innovative pedagogical approaches which contextualise project-based learning experiences within more traditional subjects including science, history, geography, literacy and numeracy.

Optical communications applications of ultra-long Raman fiber lasers

Recent work on ultra-long Raman fiber lasers has shown that it is possible to create quasi-lossless transmission conditions in fiber spans long enough to be considered for high speed optical communications. This paper reviews how quasi-lossless transmission conditions are reached and presents experimental results of 40Gb/s transmission in a quasi lossless system. The performance is compared with a conventional EDFA based system.

An agent approach to improving radio frequency identification enabled Returnable Transport Equipment

Returnable transport equipment (RTE) such as pallets form an integral part of the supply chain and poor management leads to costly losses. Companies often address this matter by outsourcing the management of RTE to logistics service providers (LSPs). LSPs are faced with the task to provide logistical expertise to reduce RTE related waste, whilst differentiating their own services to remain competitive. In the current challenging economic climate, the role of the LSP to deliver innovative ways to achieve competitive advantage has never been so important. It is reported that radio frequency identification (RFID) application to RTE enables LSPs such as DHL to gain competitive advantage and offer clients improvements such as loss reduction, process efficiency improvement and effective security. However, the increased visibility and functionality of RFID enabled RTE requires further investigation in regards to decision‐making. The distributed nature of the RTE network favours a decentralised decision‐making format. Agents are an effective way to represent objects from the bottom‐up, capturing the behaviour and enabling localised decision‐making. Therefore, an agent based system is proposed to represent the RTE network and utilise the visibility and data gathered from RFID tags. Two types of agents are developed in order to represent the trucks and RTE, which have bespoke rules and algorithms in order to facilitate negotiations. The aim is to create schedules, which integrate RTE pick‐ups as the trucks go back to the depot. The findings assert that: - agent based modelling provides an autonomous tool, which is effective in modelling RFID enabled RTE in a decentralised utilising the real‐time data facility. ‐ the RFID enabled RTE model developed enables autonomous agent interaction, which leads to a feasible schedule integrating both forward and reverse flows for each RTE batch. ‐ the RTE agent scheduling algorithm developed promotes the utilisation of RTE by including an automatic return flow for each batch of RTE, whilst considering the fleet costs andutilisation rates. ‐ the research conducted contributes an agent based platform, which LSPs can use in order to assess the most appropriate strategies to implement for RTE network improvement for each of their clients.

Modeling and optimization of cascaded erbium and holmium doped fluoride fiber lasers

Numerical modeling of cascade erbium-doped and holmium-doped fluoride fiber lasers is presented. Fiber lengths were optimized for cascade lasers that had fixed or free-running wavelengths using all known spectroscopic parameters. The performance of the cascade laser was tested against dopant concentration, energy transfer process, heat generation, output coupling, and pump schemes. The results suggest that the slope efficiencies and thresholds for both transitions increase with increasing Ho3+ or Er3+ concentration with the slope efficiency stabilizing after 1 mol% rare earth doping. The heat generation in the Ho3+-based system is lower compared to the Er 3+-based system at low dopant concentration as a result of the lower rates of multiphonon relaxation. Decreasing the output coupling for the upper (∼3 μm) transition decreases the threshold of the lower transition and the upper transition benefits from decreasing the output coupling for the lower transition for both cascade systems. The highest slope efficiency was achieved under counter-propagating pump conditions. Saturation of the output power occurs at comparatively higher pump power with dilute Er3+ doping compared with heavier doping. Overall, we show that the cascade Ho3+ -doped fluoride laser is the best candidate for high power output because of its higher slope efficiency and lower temperature excursion of the core and no saturation of the output. © 2013 IEEE.

Phase noise influence in long-range coherent optical OFDM systems with delay detection, IFFT multiplexing and FFT demodulation

We present a study of the influence of dispersion induced phase noise for CO-OFDM systems using FFT multiplexing/IFFT demultiplexing techniques (software based). The software based system provides a method for a rigorous evaluation of the phase noise variance caused by Common Phase Error (CPE) and Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) including - for the first time to our knowledge - in explicit form the effect of equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN). This, in turns, leads to an analytic BER specification. Numerical results focus on a CO-OFDM system with 10-25 GS/s QPSK channel modulation. A worst case constellation configuration is identified for the phase noise influence and the resulting BER is compared to the BER of a conventional single channel QPSK system with the same capacity as the CO-OFDM implementation. Results are evaluated as a function of transmission distance. For both types of systems, the phase noise variance increases significantly with increasing transmission distance. For a total capacity of 400 (1000) Gbit/s, the transmission distance to have the BER < 10-2 for the worst case CO-OFDM design is less than 800 and 460 km, respectively, whereas for a single channel QPSK system it is less than 1400 and 560 km.

Stabilization of self-coherent OFDM with injection locked laser

With the rebirth of coherent detection, various algorithms have come forth to alleviate phase noise, one of the main impairments for coherent receivers. These algorithms provide stable compensation, however they limit the DSP. With this key issue in mind, Fabry Perot filter based self coherent optical OFDM was analyzed which does not require phase noise compensation reducing the complexity in DSP at low OSNR. However, the performance of such a receiver is limited due to ASE noise at the carrier wavelength, especially since an optical amplifier is typically employed with the filter to ensure sufficient carrier power. Subsequently, the use of an injection-locked laser (ILL) to retrieve the frequency and phase information from the extracted carrier without the use of an amplifier was recently proposed. In ILL based system, an optical carrier is sent along with the OFDM signal in the transmitter. At the receiver, the carrier is extracted from the OFDM signal using a Fabry-Perot tunable filter and an ILL is used to significantly amplify the carrier and reduce intensity and phase noise. In contrast to CO-OFDM, such a system supports low-cost broad linewidth lasers and benefits with lower complexity in the DSP as no carrier frequency estimation and correction along with phase noise compensation is required.

Generation of optical frequency combs in fibres:an optical pulse analysis

The innovation of optical frequency combs (OFCs) generated in passive mode-locked lasers has provided astronomy with unprecedented accuracy for wavelength calibration in high-resolution spectroscopy in research areas such as the discovery of exoplanets or the measurement of fundamental constants. The unique properties of OCFs, namely a highly dense spectrum of uniformly spaced emission lines of nearly equal intensity over the nominal wavelength range, is not only beneficial for high-resolution spectroscopy. Also in the low- to medium-resolution domain, the OFCs hold the promise to revolutionise the calibration techniques. Here, we present a novel method for generation of OFCs. As opposed to the mode-locked laser-based approach that can be complex, costly, and difficult to stabilise, we propose an all optical fibre-based system that is simple, compact, stable, and low-cost. Our system consists of three optical fibres where the first one is a conventional single-mode fibre, the second one is an erbium-doped fibre and the third one is a highly nonlinear low-dispersion fibre. The system is pumped by two equally intense continuous-wave (CW) lasers. To be able to control the quality and the bandwidth of the OFCs, it is crucial to understand how optical solitons arise out of the initial modulated CW field in the first fibre. Here, we numerically investigate the pulse evolution in the first fibre using the technique of the solitons radiation beat analysis. Having applied this technique, we realised that formation of higherorder solitons is supported in the low-energy region, whereas, in the high-energy region, Kuznetsov-Ma solitons appear.

How do engineering students develop practical competencies during a period of industrial placement? - Students' perceptions

This paper explores engineering students' perceptions of developing practical competencies as experienced in their industrial placements. In addition, it discusses the criticisms in the literature on Problem Based Learning, Project Based Learning and Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate in relation to the evaluation of effective learning and teaching during placements. The paper goes on to discuss a study which examines how undergraduate engineering students develop practical competencies during their industrial placements. A phenomenological research approach is adopted using in-depth interviews and document analysis. The research findings from this PhD study will contribute to the knowledge, theory and practice for the students, the industries and the institutions of higher education as students' practical competencies are developed and graduate employability rises. In conclusion, this study explores students' experiences of developing practical competencies during industrial placements. Hence, the study should be able to contribute to a set of evidence-based guidelines for higher education institutions and industry.

Dynamic variability in adaptive systems

One of the reasons for using variability in the software product line (SPL) approach (see Apel et al., 2006; Figueiredo et al., 2008; Kastner et al., 2007; Mezini & Ostermann, 2004) is to delay a design decision (Svahnberg et al., 2005). Instead of deciding on what system to develop in advance, with the SPL approach a set of components and a reference architecture are specified and implemented (during domain engineering, see Czarnecki & Eisenecker, 2000) out of which individual systems are composed at a later stage (during application engineering, see Czarnecki & Eisenecker, 2000). By postponing the design decisions in such a manner, it is possible to better fit the resultant system in its intended environment, for instance, to allow selection of the system interaction mode to be made after the customers have purchased particular hardware, such as a PDA vs. a laptop. Such variability is expressed through variation points which are locations in a software-based system where choices are available for defining a specific instance of a system (Svahnberg et al., 2005). Until recently it had sufficed to postpone committing to a specific system instance till before the system runtime. However, in the recent years the use and expectations of software systems in human society has undergone significant changes.Today's software systems need to be always available, highly interactive, and able to continuously adapt according to the varying environment conditions, user characteristics and characteristics of other systems that interact with them. Such systems, called adaptive systems, are expected to be long-lived and able to undertake adaptations with little or no human intervention (Cheng et al., 2009). Therefore, the variability now needs to be present also at system runtime, which leads to the emergence of a new type of system: adaptive systems with dynamic variability.

Action research: minimising the impact of disruptive incidents for rail passengers through improved sharing of information

This paper reports on an action research project based in the UK rail industry; it used a novel type of Soft Systems Methodology (known as PrOH Modelling) to facilitate change in a major Train Operating Company (TOC). The project looked at a number of different disruptive incidents to compare and contrast practice via the Mitigate, Prevent, React and Recover (MPRR) Framework. One incident is detailed in depth. The paper also looks at the general process of conducting action research. This work will be of interest for researchers in the rail sector and for those conducting operations action research projects.

Highly efficient spectrally encoded imaging using a 45° tilted fiber grating

A novel highly efficient, fiber-compatible spectrally encoded imaging (SEI) system using a 45° tilted fiber grating (TFG) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. The TFG serves as an in-fiber lateral diffraction element, eliminating the need for bulky and lossy free-space diffraction gratings in conventional SEI systems. Under proper polarization control, due to the strong tilted reflection, the 45° TFG offers a diffraction efficiency as high as 93.5%. Our new design significantly reduces the volume of the SEI system and improves energy efficiency and system stability. As a proof-ofprinciple experiment, spectrally encoded imaging of a customer-designed sample (9.6 mm x 3.0 mm) using the TFG-based system is demonstrated. The lateral resolution of the SEI system is measured to be 42 μm in our experiment.