No Arabic abstract
Speed and cost of logistics are two major concerns to on-line shoppers, but they generally conflict with each other in nature. To alleviate the contradiction, we propose to exploit existing taxis that are transporting passengers on the street to relay packages collaboratively, which can simultaneously lower the cost and accelerate the speed. Specifically, we propose a probabilistic framework containing two phases called CrowdExpress for the on-time package express deliveries. In the first phase, we mine the historical taxi GPS trajectory data offline to build the package transport network. In the second phase, we develop an online adaptive taxi scheduling algorithm to find the path with the maximum arriving-on-time probability on-the-fly upon real- time requests, and direct the package routing accordingly. Finally, we evaluate the system using the real-world taxi data generated by over 19,000 taxis in a month in the city of New York, US. Results show that around 9,500 packages can be delivered successfully on time per day with the success rate over 94%, moreover, the average computation time is within 25 milliseconds.
Urban Traffic is recognized as one of the major CO2 contributors that puts a high burden on the environment. Different attempts have been made for reducing the impacts ranging from traffic management actions to shared-vehicle concepts to simply reducing the number of vehicles on the streets. By relying on cooperative approaches between different logistics companies, such as sharing and pooling resources for bundling deliveries in the same zone, an increased environmental benefit can be attained. To quantify this benefit we compare the CO2 emissions, fuel consumption and total delivery time resulting from deliveries performed by one cargo truck with two trailers versus by two single-trailer cargo trucks under real conditions in a simulation scenario in the city of Linz in Austria. Results showed a fuel consumption and CO2 emissions reduction of 28% and 34% respectively in the scenario in which resources were bundled in one single truck.
The combination of argumentation and probability paves the way to new accounts of qualitative and quantitative uncertainty, thereby offering new theoretical and applicative opportunities. Due to a variety of interests, probabilistic argumentation is approached in the literature with different frameworks, pertaining to structured and abstract argumentation, and with respect to diverse types of uncertainty, in particular the uncertainty on the credibility of the premises, the uncertainty about which arguments to consider, and the uncertainty on the acceptance status of arguments or statements. Towards a general framework for probabilistic argumentation, we investigate a labelling-oriented framework encompassing a basic setting for rule-based argumentation and its (semi-) abstract account, along with diverse types of uncertainty. Our framework provides a systematic treatment of various kinds of uncertainty and of their relationships and allows us to back or question assertions from the literature.
We develop a probabilistic framework for deep learning based on the Deep Rendering Mixture Model (DRMM), a new generative probabilistic model that explicitly capture variations in data due to latent task nuisance variables. We demonstrate that max-sum inference in the DRMM yields an algorithm that exactly reproduces the operations in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNs), providing a first principles derivation. Our framework provides new insights into the successes and shortcomings of DCNs as well as a principled route to their improvement. DRMM training via the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a powerful alternative to DCN back-propagation, and initial training results are promising. Classification based on the DRMM and other variants outperforms DCNs in supervised digit classification, training 2-3x faster while achieving similar accuracy. Moreover, the DRMM is applicable to semi-supervised and unsupervised learning tasks, achieving results that are state-of-the-art in several categories on the MNIST benchmark and comparable to state of the art on the CIFAR10 benchmark.
Computational micromagnetics requires numerical solution of partial differential equations to resolve complex interactions in magnetic nanomaterials. The Virtual Micromagnetics project described here provides virtual machine simulation environments to run open-source micromagnetic simulation packages. These environments allow easy access to simulation packages that are often difficult to compile and install, and enable simulations and their data to be shared and stored in a single virtual hard disk file, which encourages reproducible research. Virtual Micromagnetics can be extended to automate the installation of micromagnetic simulation packages on non-virtual machines, and to support closed-source and new open-source simulation packages, including packages from disciplines other than micromagnetics, encouraging reuse. Virtual Micromagnetics is stored in a public GitHub repository under a three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.
The rapid incursion of new technologies such as MEMS and smart sensor device manufacturing requires new tailor-made packaging designs. In many applications these devices are exposed to humid environments. Since the penetration of moisture into the package may result in internal corrosion or shift of the operating parameters, the reliability testing of hermetically sealed packages has become a crucial question in the semiconductor industry.