Validation and verification of embedded neural systems

DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS ONLY AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATION AT ASTON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES WITH PRIOR ARRANGEMENT

Validation and verification of embedded neural systems

DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS ONLY AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATION AT ASTON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES WITH PRIOR ARRANGEMENT

Design and development of logistics workflow systems for demand management with RFID

This paper discusses demand and supply chain management and examines how artificial intelligence techniques and RFID technology can enhance the responsiveness of the logistics workflow. This proposed system is expected to have a significant impact on the performance of logistics networks by virtue of its capabilities to adapt unexpected supply and demand changes in the volatile marketplace with the unique feature of responsiveness with the advanced technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Recent studies have found that RFID and artificial intelligence techniques drive the development of total solution in logistics industry. Apart from tracking the movement of the goods, RFID is able to play an important role to reflect the inventory level of various distribution areas. In today’s globalized industrial environment, the physical logistics operations and the associated flow of information are the essential elements for companies to realize an efficient logistics workflow scenario. Basically, a flexible logistics workflow, which is characterized by its fast responsiveness in dealing with customer requirements through the integration of various value chain activities, is fundamental to leverage business performance of enterprises. The significance of this research is the demonstration of the synergy of using a combination of advanced technologies to form an integrated system that helps achieve lean and agile logistics workflow.

Parametric Identification and Diagnosis of Integrated Navigation Systems in Bench Test Process

Growth of complexity and functional importance of integrated navigation systems (INS) leads to high losses at the equipment refusals. The paper is devoted to the INS diagnosis system development, allowing identifying the cause of malfunction. The proposed solutions permit taking into account any changes in sensors dynamic and accuracy characteristics by means of the appropriate error models coefficients. Under actual conditions of INS operation, the determination of current values of the sensor models and estimation filter parameters rely on identification procedures. The results of full-scale experiments are given, which corroborate the expediency of INS error models parametric identification in bench test process.

Grid and Simulation of Digital Communication Systems

The purpose of this paper is to turn researchers' attention to the use of grid computing for simulating digital communications and its large potential for decreasing significantly the duration of the experiments and for improving the statistical representativeness and reliability of the obtained results.

Formal methods for the development and verification of autonomic IT systems

This chapter explores ways in which rigorous mathematical techniques, termed formal methods, can be employed to improve the predictability and dependability of autonomic computing. Model checking, formal specification, and quantitative verification are presented in the contexts of conflict detection in autonomic computing policies, and of implementation of goal and utility-function policies in autonomic IT systems, respectively. Each of these techniques is illustrated using a detailed case study, and analysed to establish its merits and limitations. The analysis is then used as a basis for discussing the challenges and opportunities of this endeavour to transition the development of autonomic IT systems from the current practice of using ad-hoc methods and heuristic towards a more principled approach. © 2012, IGI Global.

Perceptions and experiences of the implementation, management, use and optimisation of electronic prescribing systems in hospital settings:protocol for a systematic review of qualitative studies

Introduction: There is increasing evidence that electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) or computerised provider/physician order entry (CPOE) systems can improve the quality and safety of healthcare services. However, it has also become clear that their implementation is not straightforward and may create unintended or undesired consequences once in use. In this context, qualitative approaches have been particularly useful and their interpretative synthesis could make an important and timely contribution to the field. This review will aim to identify, appraise and synthesise qualitative studies on ePrescribing/CPOE in hospital settings, with or without clinical decision support. Methods and analysis: Data sources will include the following bibliographic databases: MEDLINE, MEDLINE In Process, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Social Policy and Practice via Ovid, CINAHL via EBSCO, The Cochrane Library (CDSR, DARE and CENTRAL databases), Nursing and Allied Health Sources, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts via ProQuest and SCOPUS. In addition, other sources will be searched for ongoing studies (ClinicalTrials.gov) and grey literature: Healthcare Management Information Consortium, Conference Proceedings Citation Index (Web of Science) and Sociological abstracts. Studies will be independently screened for eligibility by 2 reviewers. Qualitative studies, either standalone or in the context of mixed-methods designs, reporting the perspectives of any actors involved in the implementation, management and use of ePrescribing/CPOE systems in hospital-based care settings will be included. Data extraction will be conducted by 2 reviewers using a piloted form. Quality appraisal will be based on criteria from the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist and Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research. Studies will not be excluded based on quality assessment. A postsynthesis sensitivity analysis will be undertaken. Data analysis will follow the thematic synthesis method. Ethics and dissemination: The study does not require ethical approval as primary data will not be collected. The results of the study will be published in a peer-reviewed journal and presented at relevant conferences.

Innováció és dinamizmus. Kölcsönhatás a rendszerek és a technikai haladás között = Innovation and dynamism. Reciprocal effect between systems and technical advance

A posztszocialista átalakulással foglalkozó irodalom rendszerint az átmenet politikai, gazdasági és társadalmi oldalával foglalkozik, holott az elmúlt húsz évben fontos változások mentek végbe a technikai haladás terén is. A kapitalizmus egyik fő erénye a dinamizmus, a vállalkozás, az innovációs folyamat erős ösztönzése. Valamennyi (polgári célokra használt) forradalmian új terméket a kapitalista rendszer hozta létre, a szocialista rendszer legfeljebb katonai rendeltetésű új termékekkel tudott előállni. A cikk azt elemzi, hogy mennyiben magyarázható ez a mélyreható különbség a két rendszer veleszületett hajlamaival, alapvető tulajdonságaival. Az új termékek térhódítása (köztük a számítógép, a mobiltelefon, az internet, az információs-kommunikációs szféra radikális átalakulása) megváltoztatta az emberek mindennapi életét. Miközben sokan mindezt kedvező változásként élik meg, nem vesznek tudomást a kapitalista rendszer és a gyors technikai haladás közötti okozati összefüggésről. A kapitalizmusnak e fontos erényét a mikroökonómia szokványos oktatása sem világítja meg a diákok számára, és nem kap kellő hangsúlyt a vezető politikusok megnyilvánulásaiban sem. _________________ Literature on post-socialist transformation usually deals with the political, economic and social sides of it, although there have also been important changes in the field of technical advance in the last twenty years. One of capitalisms main virtues is the strong incentive it gives to dynamism, enterprise and the innovation process. Every revolutionary new prodŹuct (for civilian use) has been brought about by the capitalist system. The socialist system was capable at most of developing new military products. The article analyses how far this radical difference can be explained by the innate tendencies and basis attributes of the two systems. Our daily lives have been transformed by these new products (for instance, the sphere of information and communications by the computer, the mobile phone and the internet). While many people see all these as favourable changes, fewer discern the causal relation between the capitalist system and rapid technical progress. Yet the usual syllabus of microeconomics does not enlighten students on this important virtue of capitalism, which is not adequately emphasized in the statements of leading politicians either.

Knowledge assisted data management and retrieval in multimedia database systems

With the proliferation of multimedia data and ever-growing requests for multimedia applications, there is an increasing need for efficient and effective indexing, storage and retrieval of multimedia data, such as graphics, images, animation, video, audio and text. Due to the special characteristics of the multimedia data, the Multimedia Database management Systems (MMDBMSs) have emerged and attracted great research attention in recent years. Though much research effort has been devoted to this area, it is still far from maturity and there exist many open issues. In this dissertation, with the focus of addressing three of the essential challenges in developing the MMDBMS, namely, semantic gap, perception subjectivity and data organization, a systematic and integrated framework is proposed with video database and image database serving as the testbed. In particular, the framework addresses these challenges separately yet coherently from three main aspects of a MMDBMS: multimedia data representation, indexing and retrieval. In terms of multimedia data representation, the key to address the semantic gap issue is to intelligently and automatically model the mid-level representation and/or semi-semantic descriptors besides the extraction of the low-level media features. The data organization challenge is mainly addressed by the aspect of media indexing where various levels of indexing are required to support the diverse query requirements. In particular, the focus of this study is to facilitate the high-level video indexing by proposing a multimodal event mining framework associated with temporal knowledge discovery approaches. With respect to the perception subjectivity issue, advanced techniques are proposed to support users' interaction and to effectively model users' perception from the feedback at both the image-level and object-level.

Solving satisfiability, *implication, and equivalence problems in database systems

Satisfiability, implication and equivalence problems are important and widely-encountered database problems that need to be efficiently and effectively solved. We provide a comprehensive and systematic study of these problems. We consider three popular types of arithmetic inequalities, (X op C), (X op Y), and (X op Y + C), where X and Y are attributes, C is a constant of the domain of X, and op $\in\ \{{<},\ {\le},\ {=},\ {\not=},\ {>},\ {\ge}\}.$ These inequalities are most frequently used in a database system, since the first type of inequalities represents $\theta$-join, the second type represents selection, and the third type is popular in deductive databases. We study the problems under the integer domain and the real domain, as well as under two different operator sets.^ Our results show that solutions under different domains and/or different operator sets are quite different. In this dissertation, we either report the first necessary and sufficient conditions as well as their efficient algorithms with complexity analysis, or provide improved algorithms. ^

Availability estimation and management for complex processing systems

“Availability” is the terminology used in asset intensive industries such as petrochemical and hydrocarbons processing to describe the readiness of equipment, systems or plants to perform their designed functions. It is a measure to suggest a facility’s capability of meeting targeted production in a safe working environment. Availability is also vital as it encompasses reliability and maintainability, allowing engineers to manage and operate facilities by focusing on one performance indicator. These benefits make availability a very demanding and highly desired area of interest and research for both industry and academia. In this dissertation, new models, approaches and algorithms have been explored to estimate and manage the availability of complex hydrocarbon processing systems. The risk of equipment failure and its effect on availability is vital in the hydrocarbon industry, and is also explored in this research. The importance of availability encouraged companies to invest in this domain by putting efforts and resources to develop novel techniques for system availability enhancement. Most of the work in this area is focused on individual equipment compared to facility or system level availability assessment and management. This research is focused on developing an new systematic methods to estimate system availability. The main focus areas in this research are to address availability estimation and management through physical asset management, risk-based availability estimation strategies, availability and safety using a failure assessment framework, and availability enhancement using early equipment fault detection and maintenance scheduling optimization.

Development of Multi-modal and Super-resolved Retinal Imaging Systems

Advancements in retinal imaging technologies have drastically improved the quality of eye care in the past couple decades. Scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are two examples of critical imaging modalities for the diagnosis of retinal pathologies. However current-generation SLO and OCT systems have limitations in diagnostic capability due to the following factors: the use of bulky tabletop systems, monochromatic imaging, and resolution degradation due to ocular aberrations and diffraction.

Bulky tabletop SLO and OCT systems are incapable of imaging patients that are supine, under anesthesia, or otherwise unable to maintain the required posture and fixation. Monochromatic SLO and OCT imaging prevents the identification of various color-specific diagnostic markers visible with color fundus photography like those of neovascular age-related macular degeneration. Resolution degradation due to ocular aberrations and diffraction has prevented the imaging of photoreceptors close to the fovea without the use of adaptive optics (AO), which require bulky and expensive components that limit the potential for widespread clinical use.

In this dissertation, techniques for extending the diagnostic capability of SLO and OCT systems are developed. These techniques include design strategies for miniaturizing and combining SLO and OCT to permit multi-modal, lightweight handheld probes to extend high quality retinal imaging to pediatric eye care. In addition, a method for extending true color retinal imaging to SLO to enable high-contrast, depth-resolved, high-fidelity color fundus imaging is demonstrated using a supercontinuum light source. Finally, the development and combination of SLO with a super-resolution confocal microscopy technique known as optical photon reassignment (OPRA) is demonstrated to enable high-resolution imaging of retinal photoreceptors without the use of adaptive optics.

Nonholonomically Constrained Dynamics and Optimization of Rolling Isolation Systems

Rolling Isolation Systems provide a simple and effective means for protecting components from horizontal floor vibrations. In these systems a platform rolls on four steel balls which, in turn, rest within shallow bowls. The trajectories of the balls is uniquely determined by the horizontal and rotational velocity components of the rolling platform, and thus provides nonholonomic constraints. In general, the bowls are not parabolic, so the potential energy function of this system is not quadratic. This thesis presents the application of Gauss's Principle of Least Constraint to the modeling of rolling isolation platforms. The equations of motion are described in terms of a redundant set of constrained coordinates. Coordinate accelerations are uniquely determined at any point in time via Gauss's Principle by solving a linearly constrained quadratic minimization. In the absence of any modeled damping, the equations of motion conserve energy. This mathematical model is then used to find the bowl profile that minimizes response acceleration subject to displacement constraint.