1,720,977 research outputs found
Decentralized control of a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles
In this paper, we present a framework for non-linear control of a swarm of agents based on the artificial potential characterized by attractive and repulsive properties. In this context, the swarm is able to reach a configuration and to maintain it, while migrating as a group and avoiding collisions among agents. Therefore, the behaviors of the swarm system proposed in this study are group migration and configuration, including collision avoidance capabilities. Different potentials expressions are evaluated and one proposed, in order to determine how quickly the swarm converges to a desired direction and velocity, and how robust the swarm is against collisions among the agents. Furthermore we provide two metrics that estimate which potential is the best one in a certain scenario. One quantifies how quickly the swarm converges to the given velocity, and the second evaluates how robust the potential is against collisions. Numerical simulations are included for verification purposes
Neural Nets on FPGA a Machine Vision Algorithm Applied On MNIST Dataset Using Hls4ml Library
In this paper we describe a machine vision Neural Net al.gorithm implemented in a FPGA. The algorithm is trained on a hand written digit MNIST dataset. For Neural Net Intellectual Property generation it is used the hls4ml library, which is a really powerful tool for fast implementation of Neural Net on FPGA
A natural language processing approach for analyzing COVID-19 vaccination response in multi-language and geo-localized tweets
Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have been paramount in the COVID-19 context due to their ability to collect public concerns about the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, which has been underway to end the COVID-19 pandemic. This worldwide campaign has heavily relied on the actual willingness of individuals to get vaccinated independently of the language they speak or the country they reside. This study analyzes Twitter posts about Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca/Vaxzevria, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines by considering the most spoken western languages. Tweets were sampled between April 15 and September 15, 2022, after the injections of at least three doses, collecting 9,513,063 posts that contained vaccine-related keywords. To determine the success of vaccination, temporal and sentiment analysis have been conducted, reporting opinion changes over time and their corresponding events whenever possible concerning each vaccine. Furthermore, we have extracted the main topics over languages providing potential bias due to the language-specific dictionary, such as Moderna in Spanish, and grouped them per country. Once performed the pre-processed procedure we worked with 8,343,490 tweets. Our findings show that Pfizer has been the most debated vaccine worldwide, and the main concerns have been the side effects on pregnant women and children and heart diseases
Porting bioinformatics applications from grid to cloud: A macromolecular surface analysis application case study
In this paper we describe our experience in exploiting different cloud-based environments for an actual use case taken from the bioinformatics domain - the molecular surfaces analysis - that identifies similarities and possible complementarities in the protein surfaces. The analysis of macromolecular surfaces is important since protein surface conformations drive many biological reactions. We developed a workflow that performs the macromolecular surfaces analysis and provides interesting results from a scientific point of view. An important issue is represented by the fact that it is highly compute-intensive, therefore it cannot be run on a single CPU system for meaningful use cases and a parallel infrastructure is required to obtain reasonable execution time. For a decade grid infrastructures have represented suitable solutions to achieve cost effective computational power for Bioinformatics applications. However, these solutions do not offer an adequate customisation of the computational environment (e.g. installing databases and configuring virtual network) due to the rigid organisation of the storage and computational sites. Running applications on customised machines obtained by user-defined images simplifies the computing model, decreases the failure rates and therefore reduces waiting times for production analysis with respect to the canonical grid computations. For these reasons a cloud-based approach is more suitable than a pure grid paradigm. We experimented using two cloud-based approaches, based on the Worker Node On Demand Service and on OpenStack, to run the molecular surfaces analysis use case and we compared the results in terms of performance, efficiency and efforts to build the computing model with respect to grid computing
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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