1,029 research outputs found
Energy-aware system-on-chip for 5 GHz wireless LANs
No full textThis paper presents the realization of an energy-aware system-on-chip that implements the baseband processing as well as the medium access control and data link control functionalities of a 5 GHz wireless system. It is compliant with the HIPERLAN/2 standard, but it also covers critical functionality of the IEEE 802.11a standard. Two embedded processor cores, dedicated hardware, on-chip memory elements, as well as advanced bus architectures and peripheral inter-faces were carefully combined and optimized for the targeted application, leading to a proper trade-off of silicon area, flexibility and power consumption. A system-level low-power design methodology has been used, due to the fact that power consumption is the most critical parameter in electronic portable system design. The 17.5 million-transistor solution was implemented in a 0.18 μm CMOS pro-cess and performs baseband processing at data rates up to 54 Mbit/s, with average power consumption of about 550 mW
Implementation Strategy and Results of an Energy-Aware System-on-Chip for 5 GHz WLAN Applications
No full textMoving pixels in static cameras: detecting dangerous situations due to environment or people
No full textDangerous situations arise in everyday life and many efforts have been lavished to exploit technology to increase the level of safety in urban areas. Video analysis is absolutely one of the most important and emerging technology for security purposes. Automatic video surveillance systems commonly analyze the scene searching for moving objects. Well known techniques exist to cope with this problem that is commonly referred as change detection". Every time a dierence against a reference model is sensed, it should be analyzed to allow the system to discriminateamong a usual situation or a possible threat. When the sensor is a camera, motion is the key element to detect changes and moving objects must be correctly classied according to their nature. In this context we can distinguish among two dierent kinds of threat that can lead to dangerous situations in a video-surveilled environment. The first one is due to environmental changes such as rain, fog or smoke present in the scene. This kind of phenomena are sensed by the camera as moving pixelsand, subsequently as moving objects in the scene. This kind of threats shares some common characteristics such as texture, shape and color information and can be detected observing the features' evolution in time. The second situation arises whenpeople are directly responsible of the dangerous situation. In this case a subject is acting in an unusual way leading to an abnormal situation. From the sensor's point of view, moving pixels are still observed, but specic features and time-dependent statistical models should be adopted to learn and then correctly detect unusual and dangerous behaviors. With these premises, this chapter will present two different case studies. The rst one describes the detection of environmental changes in theobserved scene and details the problem of reliably detecting smoke in outdoor environments using both motion information and global image features, such as color information and texture energy computed by the means of the Wavelet transform.The second refers to the problem of detecting suspicious or abnormal people behaviors by means of people trajectory analysis in a multiple cameras video-surveillance scenario. Specically, a technique to infer and learn the concept of normality is proposed jointly with a suitable statistical tool to model and robustly compare people trajectories
Measuring the force of punches using an accelerometric punching bag - Relationship between force of punches and power of jump - An example of application of the modern information technology in sport
No full textHuman-Robot Interactive Planning using Cross-Training: A Human Team Training Approach
No full textRobots are increasingly introduced to work in concert with people in high-intensity domains, such as manufacturing, space exploration and hazardous environments. Although there are numerous studies on human teamwork and coordination in these settings, very little prior work exists on applying these models to human-robot interaction. In this paper we propose a novel framework for applying prior art in Shared Mental Models (SMMs) to promote effective human-robot teaming. We present a computational teaming model to encode joint action in a human-robot team. We present results from human subject experiments that evaluate human-robot teaming in a virtual environment. We show that cross-training, a common practice used for improving human team shared mental models, yields statistically significant improvements in convergence of the computational teaming model (p=0.02) and in the human participants' perception that the robot performed according to their preferences (p=0.01), as compared to robot training using a standard interactive reinforcement learning approach. © 2012 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.ABB Inc.ABB Corporate Research Center (Vasteras, Sweden)Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundatio
Human-robot cross-training: Computational formulation, modeling and evaluation of a human team training strategy
No full textWe design and evaluate human-robot cross-training, a strategy widely used and validated for effective human team training. Cross-training is an interactive planning method in which a human and a robot iteratively switch roles to learn a shared plan for a collaborative task. We first present a computational formulation of the robot's interrole knowledge and show that it is quantitatively comparable to the human mental model. Based on this encoding, we formulate human-robot cross-training and evaluate it in human subject experiments (n = 36). We compare human-robot cross-training to standard reinforcement learning techniques, and show that cross-training provides statistically significant improvements in quantitative team performance measures. Additionally, significant differences emerge in the perceived robot performance and human trust. These results support the hypothesis that effective and fluent human-robot teaming may be best achieved by modeling effective practices for human teamwork.ABB Inc.U.S. Commercial Regional CenterAlexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundatio
The Young Turk revolution and the Macedonian question 1908-1912
No full textEuropean-imposed reforms in Ottoman-held Macedonia in the period 1904-1908 led to the diminution of Ottoman authority, the encouragement of Christian partisan
activities and the consolidation of the Young Turk movement in the region. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 established a Constitutional and Parliamentary regime
in the Ottoman Empire pledging institutional reform, equality and liberty for all nationalities.
Between July 1908 and April 1909, it became clear that the Young Turk policies and the Macedonian aspirations of the Christian Balkan countries were incompatible. The
Young Turks remained a predominantly Moslem movement committed to safeguard the territorial integrity of the Empire, prevent foreign interference in Ottoman affairs
and counteract Christian Macedonian separatism.
By contrast, following the withdrawal of European control from Macedonia, the Balkan Christians attempted to take advantage of the Ottoman Constitutional change
to further their own political and national interests in Macedonia. Disillusioned by the Young Turk centralist tendencies and apprehensive of a resurgent Turkish nationalism, Bulgarian, Greek and Serb nationalists resorted -once more- to their original means of Macedonian propaganda: religious, cultural and revolutionary activity.
During 1909-1912, the Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P.) -the driving force in the Young Turk movement- initiated a policy of enforced denationalization on the
non-Moslem ethnic groups. Implemented in a harsh manner in Macedonia, this practice irrevocably undermined any prospect of cooperation between Moslem Young Turks and Christian Macedonians. Its aftermath included the growth of the Albanian nationalist movement and the encouragement of rapprochement between the Christian Balkan states, which was to bring about the establishment of the Balkan Alliance and the collapse of European Turkey in the Balkan wars
Prediction of somatotype from bioimpedance analysis in elite youth soccer players
No full textThe accurate body composition assessment comprises several variables, causing it to be a time consuming evaluation as well as requiring different and sometimes costly measurement instruments. The aim of this study was to develop new equations for the somatotype prediction, reducing the number of normal measurements required by the Heath and Carter approach. A group of 173 male soccer players (age, 13.6 ± 2.2 years, mean ± standard deviation; body mass index, BMI, 19.9 ± 2.5 kg/m2), members of the academy of a professional Italian soccer team participating in the first division (Serie A), participated in this study. Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) was performed using the single frequency of 50 kHz and fat-free mass (FFM) was calculated using a BIA specific, impedance based equation. Somatotype components were estimated according to the Heath-Carter method. The participants were randomly split into development (n = 117) and validation groups (n = 56). New anthropometric and BIA based models were developed (endomorphy = −1.953 − 0.011 × stature2/resistance + 0.135 × BMI + 0.232 × triceps skinfold, R2 = 0.86, SEE = 0.28; mesomorphy = 6.848 + 0.138 × phase angle + 0.232 × contracted arm circumference + 0.166 × calf circumference − 0.093 × stature, R2 = 0.87, SEE = 0.40; ectomorphy = −5.592 − 38.237 × FFM/stature + 0.123 × stature, R2 = 0.86, SEE = 0.37). Cross validation revealed R2 of 0.84, 0.80, and 0.87 for endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy, respectively. The new proposed equations allow for the integration of the somatotype assessment into BIA, reducing the number of collected measurements, the instruments used, and the time normally required to obtain a complete body composition analysis
Fast ReRoute on programmable switches
No full textHighly dependable communication networks usually rely on some kind of Fast Re-Route (FRR) mechanism which allows to quickly re-route traffic upon failures, entirely in the data plane. This paper studies the design of FRR mechanisms for emerging reconfigurable switches. Our main contribution is an FRR primitive for programmable data planes, PURR, which provides low failover latency and high switch throughput, by avoiding packet recirculation. PURR tolerates multiple concurrent failures and comes with minimal memory requirements, ensuring compact forwarding tables, by unveiling an intriguing connection to classic 'string theory' (i.e., stringology), and in particular, the shortest common supersequence problem. PURR is well-suited for high-speed match-action forwarding architectures (e.g., PISA) and supports the implementation of a broad variety of FRR mechanisms. Our simulations and prototype implementation (on an FPGA and a Tofino switch) show that PURR improves TCAM memory occupancy by a factor of 1.5 × - 10.8× compared to a naïve encoding when implementing state-of-the-art FRR mechanisms. PURR also improves the latency and throughput of datacenter traffic up to a factor of 2.8 × - 5.5 × and 1.2 × - 2 ×, respectively, compared to approaches based on recirculating packets
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