Abstract

In order to help architects and designers make early design decisions, an online tool (WinOpt) has been developed. WinOpt optimizes various components associated with the design of windows such as Azimuth Angle (angle with respect to North), Aspect Ratio, WWR (Window Wall Ratio), SHGC (Solar Heat Gain Coefficient) of glass used for windows, and various local shading strategies such as overhang and side fins. WinOpt performs annual energy simulations for a given location using EnergyPlus. It uses an optimization tool in the back end (GenOpt) to reduce the few million simulations to a few hundred, thus helping in making perfect rapid design decisions. WinOpt optimizes the design to minimize the operational energy for conditioned buildings and maximize thermal comfort for unconditioned buildings. It also has a parametric option where parametric simulations are performed for selected values for various input parameters. This can help the user understand the spectrum of design solutions. Since EnergyPlus can evaluate thermal comfort conditions besides energy consumption in a building, WinOpt can help in design decisions for low energy/ net zero energy buildings.

Abstract

We present various robust precoder designs for two-way relaying in a cognitive radio network, where a pair of cognitive (or secondary) transceiver nodes communicate with each other assisted by a set of cognitive two-way relays. The secondary nodes share the spectrum with a licensed primary user (PU) node while keeping the interference to the PU below a specified threshold. The PU node and the cognitive transceivers employ single transmit/receive antennas whereas the secondary relay nodes employ multiple transmit/receive antennas. The proposed precoder designs ensure robust performance in the presence of errors in the channel state information (CSI). Such robust designs are of significant interest since in practice it is very difficult to obtain perfect CSI. We consider CSI errors with two different types of characterization and corresponding robust designs. First, we consider robust relay precoder designs that are applicable when CSI errors have known first and second moments. Next, we consider robust designs that are applicable when the CSI error can be characterized in terms of spherical uncertainty region. We show that the proposed designs can be reformulated as convex optimization problems that can be solved efficiently. Through numerical simulations and comparisons we illustrate the performance of the proposed designs.

Abstract

Most of the existing vowel onset point (VOP) detection methods are developed for clean speech. In this chapter, we propose methods for detection of VOPs in the presence of speech coding and background noise conditions. VOP detection method for coded speech is based on the spectral energy between 500 and 2,500 Hz frequency band of the speech segments present in glottal closure region. In case of noisy speech, the proposed VOP detection method exploits the spectral energy at the formant locations of the speech segments present in glottal closure region. The proposed VOP detection methods are evaluated using objective measures and consonant vowel (CV) unit recognition experiments.

Abstract

The scan-line corrector (SLC) of the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor failed in May 2003, and this abnormal functioning of SLC resulted in about 22% of the pixels per scene without being scanned. By filling the un-scanned gap by a good technique will help in more use of ETM+ data for many scientific applications. While there have been a number of approaches developed to fill in the data gaps in ETM+ imagery, each method has shortcomings, especially they require SLC-on (images acquired before SLC-off anomaly) imagery for the same location to fill the gaps in SLC-off (images acquired after SLC anomaly) image. To overcome such shortcomings this study proposes an alternative interpolation method based on the partial derivative. This case study shows that this technique is very much useful to interpolate the missing pixel values in the SLC-off ETM+ data.

Abstract

The deterioration and loss of water bodies like lakes due to anthropogenic activities, are at the same pace at which forests are degraded. Lakes and ponds play a major role in the global cycle (carbon, water, etc.). They act as the basic units of hydrological systems to better understand the biogeochemical processes that take place within these aquatic systems and further for their management plans. As an initiative of managing resources at the unit level (lake) in the current study, we tried to understand the history and ecological dynamics of" Brahmayyalingam Cheruvu", a lake located in the peri-urban areas of the rapidly expanding Vijayawada city, Andhra Pradesh State, India. The study is based on field inventories, local surveys and satellite data, both current and past. Use of satellite images aided in capturing the changing spatiao-temporal lake dynamics due to climatic variations and government policy. The …

Abstract

In this work, we consider the problem of finding the closest pair (in L 1 metric) of points in an orthogonal query rectangle. Given a set of n static points on a U× U grid, we preprocess these points into a data structure of size O (m f (m) log 2 m) that can be queried in time O ((g (m)+ log log m) log 3 m), for m= O (n log U) and (i) f (m)= O (1) and g (m)= O (log ε m);(ii) f (m)= O (log log m) and g (m)= O (log log m);(iii) f (m)= O (log ε m) and g (m)= O (1). Here ε: 0< ε< 1 is a small but arbitrary constant.

Abstract

A t-ruling set of a graph G=(V, E) is a vertex-subset S⊆ V that is independent and satisfies the property that every vertex v∈ V is at a distance of at most t hops from some vertex in S. A maximal independent set (MIS) is a 1-ruling set. Extending results from Kothapalli et al.(FSTTCS 2012) this note presents a randomized algorithm for computing, with high probability, a t-ruling set in O (t⋅ log 1/(t-1) n) rounds for 2< t≤√(log log n) and in (O (√(log log n))) rounds for t>√(log log n).

Abstract

In this work, we extensively study the problem of broadcasting of quantum correlations (QCs). This includes broadcasting of quantum entanglement as well as correlations that go beyond the notion of entanglement (QCsbE). It is quite well known from the “no-broadcasting theorem” that perfect broadcasting of QCs is not possible. However, it does not rule out the possibility of partial broadcasting of QCs where we can get lesser correlated states from a given correlated state. In order to have a holistic view of broadcasting, we investigate this problem by starting with a most general representation of two qubit mixed states in terms of the Bloch vectors. As a cloning transformation we have used universal symmetric optimal Buzek-Hillery (BH) cloner both locally and nonlocally. Unlike entanglement, we find that it is impossible to broadcast QCsbE optimally. Lastly, we generalize these results for any symmetric or asymmetric cloning machines as well. This result brings out a fundamental difference between the correlations defined from the perspective of entanglement and the correlations measure which claims to go beyond entanglement.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of quantum dissension for three qubit states in various dissipative channels such as amplitude damping, dephasing and depolarizing. Our study is solely based on Markovian environments where quantum channels are without memory and each qubit is coupled to its own environment. We start with mixed GHZ, mixed W, mixture of separable states, a mixed biseparable state, as the initial states and mostly observe that the decay of quantum dissension is asymptotic in contrast to sudden death of quantum entanglement in similar environments. This is a clear indication of the fact that quantum correlation in general is more robust against the effect of noise. However, for a given class of initial mixed states we find a temporary leap in quantum dissension for a certain interval of time. More precisely, we observe the revival of quantum correlation to happen for certain time period. This signifies that the measure of quantum correlation such as quantum discord, quantum dissension, defined from the information theoretic perspective is different from the correlation defined from the entanglement-separability paradigm and can increase under the effect of the local noise. We also study the effects of these channels on the monogamy score of each of these initial states. Interestingly, we find that for certain class of states and channels, there is change from negative values to positive values of the monogamy score with classical randomness as well as with time. This gives us an important insight in obtaining states which are freely sharable (polygamous state) from the states which are not freely sharable (monogamous). This is indeed a remarkable feature, as we can create monogamous states from polygamous states Monogamous states are considered to have more signatures of quantum ness and can be used for security purpose.

Abstract

Optic nerve head (ONH) segmentation problem has been of interest for automated glaucoma assessment. Although various segmentation methods have been proposed in the recent past, it is difficult to evaluate and compare the performance of individual methods due to a lack of a benchmark dataset. The problem of segmentation involves segmentation of optic disk and cup region within ONH region. Available datasets do not incorporate challenges present in this problem. In this data paper, we present a comprehensive dataset of retinal images which include both normal and glaucomatous eyes and manual segmentations from multiple human experts. Both area and boundary-based evaluation measures are presented to evaluate a method on various aspects relevant to the problem of glaucoma assessment.