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The Helix project is a multiyear longitudinal research study focus on understanding what makes systems engineers effective. The Helix team gathered data through interviews, site visits, and surveys with individuals who are doing systems engineering (SE) work on programs, supervising systems engineers, using products from systems engineers, and are knowledgeable about SE. The responses provided by the participants were documented and analyzed using text mining techniques, such as topic modeling and word similarity. To interpret the results, the team developed several visualizations from three scenarios, full corpus, by organization type, and by domain. The visuals show the common language among systems engineers within topics and the relationship between words from the three scenarios mentioned above. Also, the article provides insights into what enables systems engineers to be proficient or effective in their organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often face risk-prone situations, that range from a mild event to a severe, life-threatening scenario. Risk situations stem from a number of different scenarios: a health condition, a hazard situation due to a natural disaster, a dangerous situation because one is being subject to a crime or physical violence, among others. The lack of a prompt response, calling for assistance, may severely worsen the consequences. In this paper, we propose a novel visualisation method to track and to identify, in real-time, when a person is under a risk-prone situation. Our visualisation model is capable of providing a decision maker a visual description of the physiological behaviour of an individual, or a group thereof; through it, the decision maker may infer whether further assistance is required, if a risky situation is in progress. Our visualisation is leveraged with a traffic light model of a one-class classifier. This combination allows us to train the decision maker into visualising correct and potential risky or abnormal behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the gestation and evolution of the Network Coding paradigm and its application on multicast networks, there is a tendency to increase the network performance, by sending multiple packets simultaneously to multiple destinations from a source node. Using the concepts to explain the Multicast Linear Network Coding on symbols belonging to finite field F_2, a program is presented to obtain to the level of each of the intermediate links in the network, the packets size m-bits belonging to a finite field F_q, where q=2^m, for any value of m and, in the sink nodes, the original packets sent from the source node. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social Media is playing a key role in today's society. Many of the events that are taking place in diverse human activities could be explained by the study of these data. Big Data is a relatively new parading in Computer Science that is gaining increasing interest by the scientific community. Big Data Predictive Analytics is a Big Data discipline that is mostly used to analyze what is in the huge amounts of data and then perform predictions based on such analysis using advanced mathematics and computing techniques. The study of Social Media Data involves disciplines like Natural Language Processing, by the integration of this area to academic studies, useful findings have been achieved. Social Network Rating Systems are online platforms that allow users to know about goods and services, the way in how users review and rate their experience is a field of evolving research. This paper presents a deep investigation in the state of the art of these areas to discover and analyze the current status of the research that has been developed so far by academics of diverse background. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The allocation of limited yet costly police resources is a daily dilemma for police commanders. More than 50% of police department costs go into patrolling operations, which include responding to emergencies and maintaining police presence in patrolling areas. This research aims to address the managerial challenges and tradeoffs that police commanders face when designing patrolling strategies: lessening the economic burden of crime prevention and maintaining high levels of public safety. The proposed framework is implemented through a mathematical framework and simulation to obtain the best patrolling strategies for the Seattle Police Department, and the simulation results show that patrol performance can be improved using the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter describes a new application of single-ended primary converter (SEPIC) and Cuk converter for dc bipolar network. A dc–dc converter configuration based on a combination of both converters is proposed. In the resulting topology, the switching node is shared by the SEPIC and Cuk converter since they have the same instantaneous duty cycle. The main advantage of this topology is that synchronization of various switches is not required and control terminal is connected to ground which simplifies the design of the gate drive. On the other hand, this configuration allows the connection of renewable energy sources to microgrids (MG)-type bipolar dc link and to cover the current needs of new distributed generation units with efficient, economical, and easy way. To verify its performance, a prototype was designed. Experimental results show as this combination of two converter topologies with appropriated modulation schemes are adequate to use in dc MG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a system maturity scale, i.e., system readiness level (SRL), was proposed to measure the maturity that a system achieves during development. However, this SRL assesses maturity for systems from only a single function and capability perspective, and is unable to assess maturity for multifunction multicapability (MFMC) systems. With ever increasing systems that provide multiple functions and capabilities, it is challenging for managers to properly allocate resources to ensure the achievement of critical capabilities and functions. In order to prioritize the allocation of resources for component development, it is common to perform importance analysis during system development and maintenance. Therefore, this paper first enhances the original SRL definition for maturity assessment at the capability, function, and system levels, and then, proposes the use of component importance analysis for the identification of the most important components for system development. This paper approaches component importance by introducing three important measures with respects to three main factors: technology readiness level/integration readiness level, developing cost, and developing effort. The paper uses an illustrative example of a MFMC system to show the proposed methodology and enhanced definitions and concludes with a discussion of the added value and future work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a holistic method that links together Monte-Carlo simulation, exact algorithms, and a data mining technique, to develop approximate bounds on the reliability of capacitated two-terminal networks. The method uses simulation to generate network configurations that are then evaluated with exact algorithms to investigate if they correspond to a network success or failure. Subsequently, the method implements commercially available software to generate a classification tree that can then be analyzed, and transformed into capacitated minimal cut or path vectors. These vectors correspond to the capacitated version of binary minimal cuts & paths of a network. This is the first time that these vectors are obtained from a decision tree, and in this respect, research efforts have been focused on two main directions: 1) deriving an efficient yet intuitive approach to simulate network configurations to obtain the most accurate information; and given that the classification tree method could for some applications provide imperfect or incomplete information without the explicit knowledge of the reliability engineer, 2) understand the relationship between the obtained vectors, and the real capacitated minimal cut & path vectors of the network, and its reliability. The proposed method has been tested on a set of case networks to assess its validity & accuracy. The results obtained show that the technique described is effective, simple, and widely applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]