Co-design of H∞ jump observers for event-based measurements over networks

This work presents a strategy to minimise the network usage and the energy consumption of wireless battery-powered sensors in the observer problem over networks. The sensor nodes implement a periodic send-on-delta approach, sending new measurements when a measure deviates considerably from the previous sent one. The estimator node implements a jump observer whose gains are computed offline and depend on the combination of available new measurements. We bound the estimator performance as a function of the sending policies and then state the design procedure of the observer under fixed sending thresholds as a semidefinite programming problem. We address this problem first in a deterministic way and, to reduce conservativeness, in a stochastic one after obtaining bounds on the probabilities of having new measurements and applying robust optimisation problem over the possible probabilities using sum of squares decomposition. We relate the network usage with the sending thresholds and propose an iterative procedure for the design of those thresholds, minimising the network usage while guaranteeing a prescribed estimation performance. Simulation results and experimental analysis show the validity of the proposal and the reduction of network resources that can be achieved with the stochastic approach.     

A pipeline structure for the block QR update in digital signal processing

The Journal of Supercomputing - There exist problems in the field of digital signal processing, such as filtering of acoustic signals that require processing a large amount of data in real time....     

Revisiting the Hydraulics of the Aznalcóllar Mine Disaster

The Aznalcóllar tailings pond failure (1998) is regarded as one of the severe ecological mine disasters ever reported. The spill of the mine tailings affected more than 60 km of the Agrio and Guadiamar rivers and caused major environmental damage. Despite the event being well-documented with more than 400 scientific publications, including two special issues and two reviews, several hydraulic uncertainties and inconsistencies remain. This paper conducts a state-of-the-art review of the most relevant hydraulic aspects of the mine disaster. It addresses the pond and fluid characteristics, the break type, the breaking time, the flow propagation, the volume potentially stored and subsequently spilled, area dimensions affected by the spill, and the morphological changes generated in the river and riverbanks caused by the spill, and later on by the restoration activities. Several discrepancies and plenty of controversial data have been unearthed that may affect general understanding of the event. In addition, new data is introduced and analysed applying photointerpretation and digital terrain analysis techniques, aiming to derive in essential hydraulic parameters. The most important findings are that the spill could have had a volume about 11.5 hm³, affecting about 86.7 km of river length, twice the most referenced values in the literature, and that applied restoration activities have substantially modified the hydro-sedimentary processes of the affected system. Additionally, a first video observation-based classification reveals that the fluid behaved more like a highly concentrated sediment-laden flow than like a mud flow.

     

Modeling power and energy consumption of dense matrix factorizations on multicore processors

In this paper, we propose a model for the energy consumption of the concurrent execution of three key dense matrix factorizations, with task parallelism leveraged via the Symmetric Multi‐Processing Superscalar (SMPSs) runtime, on a multicore processor. Our model decomposes the power dissipation into the system, static and dynamic components, with the former two being estimated from basic, off‐line experiments. The dynamic power, on the other hand, requires significantly more care, and we introduce a contention‐aware model that accommodates for the variability of power consumption due to memory contention. Experimental results on an Intel Xeon E5504 processor with four cores, using an internal powermeter that samples the power drawn by the mainboard with a frequency of 1 KHz, show the reliability of the energy model for the Cholesky, LU, and QR factorizations on this platform. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mother-child interactional patterns in high- and low-risk mothers

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present study was to determine the extent to which mother-child interactional patterns in high- and low-risk (for child physical abuse) mothers were similar to patterns observed in physically abusive parents. METHOD: Ten high-risk and 10 demographically similar low-risk mother-child dyads were studied. Trained observers coded maternal-child interaction patterns in the home during five 1-hour periods using the Standardized Observation Codes system. RESULTS: As expected, high-risk mothers made fewer neutral approaches to their children, displayed more negative behaviors toward their children, and made more indiscriminant responses to their children's prosocial behavior. Expected risk group differences were not found in the number of neutral instructions or positive responses, albeit the proportion of positive responses out of the total number of positive and negative responses was higher for low-risk mothers. After control for educational differences, risk group differences remained in the rates of neutral approaches and the number of indiscriminant behaviors made in response to children's prosocial behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: The observational data indicated that high-risk mothers display some behaviors similar to those observed in physically abusive mothers. The finding that high-risk mothers made more indiscriminate or noncontingent responses when reacting to their children's prosocial behavior is consistent with a coercive model of child physical abuse.     

Detecting semantic violations of lock-free data structures through C++ contracts

The Journal of Supercomputing - The use of synchronization mechanisms in multithreaded applications is essential on shared-memory multi-core architectures. However, debugging parallel applications...     

Observer‐based controllers with data dropout rate adaptation

In this work, we address the observer‐based control problem for networked control systems with an unknown time‐varying packet arrival rate (PAR) and under root mean square‐norm bounded disturbances. We assume packetized transmissions of both measurement and control input through a communication network with successful delivery acknowledgement. Using the measurement reception state and the control transmission acknowledgement, we derive a filter to estimate the PAR. We consider that the PAR changes sporadically from a constant value to another one; that is, it has two different behaviours: transient and steady state. While the observer only updates the state estimation using the current received measurements, the controller computes the control action employing the current state estimation and the previous applied control input. We propose to schedule both the observer and controller with rational functions of the PAR estimation. We show that the separation principle applies, and then, seeking higher performance accuracy, we develop an optimization observer and controller design procedure that considers the two possible behaviours of the PAR. This optimization procedure attempts to maximize the estimation and control performances for each of the possible constant values of the PAR while offering robustness against PAR estimation errors and variations of the PAR. By exploiting sum‐of‐squares decomposition techniques, the design procedure involves an optimization problem over polynomials. A numerical example illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of stability of food emulsions by Eyring's theory: Influence of different biopolymers

Eyring's kinetic theory of liquids was applied to the study of flow behavior of low oil content mayonnaises at different temperatures. These food emulsions were formulated with different biopolymers as stabilizers (polysaccharides such as modified starch, gellan gum, and pectin). The analysis of the values obtained for the parameters of the Eyring equation for viscosity determined the emulsion containing only starch as a stabilizer is the most unstable to stirring. Replacement of part of the starch with gellan gum or pectin enhances the stability of the emulsion. The results for activation energy are quite similar for high shear rates, which can be explained by the evolution of the average drop size distribution. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 92: 2653–2657, 2004