Abstract

This paper proposes a system for monitoring of condition and surface of roads in developing countries like India. This system will be used by government agencies to monitor municipal activities like road laying and planning. The system utilizes a database created by geo-citizens or government workers as an input. The heavy machinery in existing systems is not an optimized solution to this problem. Some existing systems use GPS and accelerometer data for determining such artifacts. So, it is evident that there is a need for a system that generates robust, frequent and accountable geo-tagged data. We propose a new collaborative model for such a purpose by fusion of data from multiple sensors hosted on smart-phones of several active geo-citizens. The system focuses mainly on volunteered geographic information, in which users can use their respective smart-phones to collect the data required and upload it for further analysis. The server side of the system infuses this data into a PostGIS database and displays the road condition on a near real-time basis over a WebGIS. The strength of a good visualization in imparting insight to decision-makers is widely recognized. We advance the paper by assessing procured road data and displaying it in an easy to understand format. In addition to visualization, the WebGIS component also provides for timeline analysis of changes in road conditions, which may help in the improved management of road infrastructure.

Abstract

Barak valley is a region in north east part of India where the practice of shifting cultivation is quite prevalent. Population growth coupled with the geographic isolation of the area have led to an increased pressure on land and a consequent decline in forest cover. The decrease of forests observed is spatially distributed and dependent on neighborhood rules. Hence, we look towards modelling the land use change to understand the land use changes and the factors affecting them. In this paper, we modify an agent-based land use model for modelling shifting cultivation to determine how various policy changes at a larger scale might affect the shifting cultivation practice in the region at the micro level. We explore scenarios like drastic population increase and availability of irrigation infrastructure in the area. Through the scenario analysis we explore how policies play a role in agriculture patterns and influence land use patterns.

Abstract

Across the world billions of dollars of damage are attributed to rodents, resulting in them being classified collectively as the biggest animal pest in the world. At a commercial scale most pest control companies employ the labour intensive approach of deploying and manually monitoring rodenticide bait stations. In this paper was present, RatSpy, a visual, low-power bait station monitoring system which wirelessly reports both on bait station levels and intruders entering the bait station. The smart bait stations report data back to a custom designed cloud platform. The system performance was evaluated under realistic field conditions (on an active cattle farm) with initial results showing significant potential in terms of reducing manual labour, improving scalability and data.

Abstract

A plethora of program analysis and optimization techniques rely on linear programming at their heart. However, such techniques are often considered too slow for production use. While today’s best solvers are optimized for complex problems with thousands of dimensions, linear programming, as used in compilers, is typically applied to small and seemingly trivial problems, but to many instances in a single compilation run. As a result, compilers do not benefit from decades of research on optimizing large-scale linear programming. We design a simplex solver targeted at compilers. A novel theory of transprecision computation applied from individual elements to full data-structures provides the computational foundation. By carefully combining it with optimized representations for small and sparse matrices and specialized small-coefficient algorithms, we (1) reduce memory traffic, (2) exploit wide vectors, and (3) use low-precision arithmetic units effectively. We evaluate our work by embedding our solver into a state-of-the-art integer set library and implement one essential operation, coalescing, on top of our transprecision solver. Our evaluation shows more than an order-of-magnitude speedup on the core simplex pivot operation and a mean speedup of 3.2x (vs. GMP) and 4.6x (vs. IMath) for the optimized coalescing operation. Our results demonstrate that our optimizations exploit the wide SIMD instructions of modern microarchitectures effectively. We expect our work to provide foundations for a future integer set library that uses transprecision arithmetic to accelerate compiler analyses

Abstract

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license,

Abstract

Cellular processes are inherently noisy, and the selection for accurate responses in presence of noise has likely shaped signalling networks. Here, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy of information transmission and its energetic cost for a mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signalling cascade. Our analysis of the pheromone response pathway of budding yeast suggests that dose-dependent induction of the negative transcriptional feedbacks in this network maximizes the information per unit energetic cost, rather than the information transmission capacity itself. We further demonstrate that futile cycling of MAPK phosphorylation and dephosphorylation has a measurable effect on growth fitness, with energy dissipation within the signalling cascade thus likely being subject to evolutionary selection. Considering optimization of accuracy versus the energetic cost of information processing, a concept well established in physics and engineering, may thus offer a general framework to understand the regulatory design of cellular signalling systems.

Abstract

Idiomatic expressions have always been a bottleneck for language comprehension and natural language understanding, specifically for tasks like Machine Translation (MT). MT systems predominantly produce literal translations of idiomatic expressions as they do not exhibit generic and linguistically deterministic patterns which can be exploited for comprehension of the non- compositional meaning of the expressions. These expressions occur in parallel corpora used for training, but due to the comparatively high occurrences of the constituent words of idiomatic expressions in literal context, the idiomatic meaning gets overpowered by the compositional meaning of the expression. State of the art Metaphor Detection Systems are able to detect non-compositional usage at word level but miss out on idiosyncratic phrasal idiomatic expressions. This creates a dire need for a dataset with a wider coverage and higher occurrence of commonly occurring idiomatic expressions, the spans of which can be used for Metaphor Detection. With this in mind, we present our English Possible Idiomatic Expressions (EPIE) corpus containing 25,206 sentences labelled with lexical instances of 717 idiomatic expressions. These spans also cover literal usages for the given set of idiomatic expressions. We also present the utility of our dataset by using it to train a sequence labelling module and testing on three independent datasets with high accuracy, precision and recall scores.

Abstract

Inspecting and assessing the quality of traffic infrastructure (such as the state of the signboards or road markings) is challenging for humans due to (i) the massive length of roads that countries will have and (ii) the regular frequency at which this needs to be done. In this paper, we demonstrate a scalable system that uses computer vision for automatic inspection of road infrastructure from a simple video captured from a moving vehicle. We validated our method on 1500 kms of roads captured in and around the city of Hyderabad, India. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the feasibility, scalability and effectiveness of our solution.

Abstract

Question Answer pair generation is a task that has been worked upon by multiple researchers in many languages. It has been a topic of interest due to its extensive uses in different fields like self assessment, academics, busi ness website FAQs etc. Many experiments were conducted on Question Answering pair generation in English, concentrating on basic Whquestions with a rulebased approach. We have built the first hybrid machine learning and rulebased solution in Telugu which is ef ficient for short stories or short passages in children’s books. Our work covers the funda mental question forms with the question types: adjective, yes/no, adverb, verb, when, where, whose, quotative, and quantitative(how many/ how much). We constructed rules for question generation using POS tags and UD tags along with linguistic information of the surrounding context of the word.

Abstract

n this study, a 3D seismic response of soil deposit, soil-ash deposit and soil-ash-foundation system was investigated. Homogeneous sand deposit of 80m × 9m × 20m was initially analyzed. A pond ash layer is on top of the sand deposit with varying thicknesses and the efficiency of the pond ash layer on the sand deposit was evaluated for its best suitability. The optimum sand-ash deposit overlain by a shallow foundation has been analysed under the excitation of the Nepal (Mw:7.8) and North East India earthquake (Mw:7.5). A seismic response analysis was performed using finite element software PLAXIS3D. The finite element model adopted for the present study has been validated using 1D nonlinear ground response analysis programs. e.g. DEEPSOIL and Cyclic1D. Results of the response analysis have been determined in terms of acceleration, displacement, excess pore pressure, and excess pore pressure ratio. It was observed that, the sand-pond ash-foundation system experienced liquefaction when excited under the Nepal earthquake motion whereas it is safe against the North East India earthquake.