Search

This paper is the product of SRK Exploration Services UK through the EU funded Horizon 2020INFACT project and research undertaken as part of the doctoral study by an associate consultant. It marries European wide research through INFACT with doctoral research into the mining sector and communities in Serbia, to illustrate general and country specific issues around social license to operate. The paper illustrates how gaps are created in the extractive industries conceptualization of host communities and how that precipitates social licence to operate failures. It challenges the extractive industries use of the stakeholder concept and questions how equipped the sector is to engage and assess community-based business risk Solutions to social licence failure in the extraction industry involve engaging with the conflict and enabling dissenting voices at an early stage of project development, rather than quelling them. Resolution to social licence issues is more likely if local communities are supported to retain control of and articulate potential conflict, rather than the conflict being captured and utilized by external actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses changes in corporate environmental performance in the pulp manufacturing industry. A study of 14 pulp manufacturing mills is looked at. The author notes the reputation of pulp mills as a heavily-polluting sector subject to the scrutiny of regulatory and environmental agencies. The motivation of firms to achieve compliance in environmental law is considered. The majority of improvements in environmental performance are the result of expensive investments in new technologies mandated by the tightening of firms' regulatory licenses. The effects of environmental management are discussed, including five different types of environmental management styles.

Many academic papers that are to be submitted to refereed conferences and journals have been previously exposed to the author's colleagues. The term 'preprints' has long been used to describe such documents. 'Departmental Working Paper' series were for many years a conventional vehicle for their publication. In the modern world, preprints are frequently transmitted electronically, variously as e-mail attachments and as files available for download via FTP or HTTP. When a preprint is made available electronically, it is likely that the author provides the recipient not only with a copy, but also with a copyright licence. In most cases, however, the licence is only implicit, and the terms of the licence are unclear. This creates the potential for considerable uncertainties, and those uncertainties are of serious concern in the context of tension between for-profit publishers of refereed articles and the research communities that referee and edit them gratis, and depend on them for early access to information. This paper briefly reviews the open content and ePrints movements, considers the interests of the various stakeholders, proposes a set of licence terms intended to satisfy the needs of all parties, and concludes that a particular Creative Commons licence type should be applied to all electronic preprints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about a draft document released by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) in the U.S. The author thinks that the document is an attempt by the NCSBN to exert inappropriate and unnecessary control over Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRN) and their practice. NCSBN officials imply that problems with APRN practice can only be corrected by requiring second licensure for APRN to protect the public from potential harm.

This paper reviews events in the plain paper copier (PPC) market immediately after Xerox's monopoly ended. Xerox's behavior and that of a flood of PPC entrants are viewed through the lens of recent advances in the theory of entry and entry deterrence. The events of the early post-entry period also cast some interesting light on the theory of technological competition. Xerox did three things which form the basis for investigation: it price discriminated, priced far from costs, and patented every imaginable feature of the copier technology. The early entrants in early 1970's and the effects of the FTC consent decree requiring Xerox to license its patents to all corners in 1975 were substantially affected by the initial conditions at the beginning of the competitive period. Plain paper copiers are complex, highly technical products. Firms vary in the degree of non hardware service they bundle to their machines. Xerox had an extremely large rental fleet of copiers at the time of entry. As a result, the capital loss on existing copiers due to competitive price falls were born by Xerox, not by old customers. A table in the article shows rates of change of prices indexes for PPCs calculated on the basis of standard lease contracts for those machines which do not change features between years.

This paper proposes a methodology to assess video quality, spatial and social presence, empathy, attitude, and attention in 360-degree videos for immersive communications. The methodology is validated in an experiment which simulates an immersive communication environment where participants attend three conversations of different genre (everyday conversation, educational, and discussion) and from actor and observer acquisition perspectives. We consider three experimental conditions: (A) visualizing and rating the perceptual quality of contents in a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), (B) visualizing the contents in an HMD, and (C) visualizing the contents in an HMD where participants can see their hands and take notes. In all conditions participants visualize the same 360-degree videos, designed and acquired in the context of international experiences. Fifty-four participants were evenly distributed among A, B, and C conditions taking into account their international experience backgrounds (working or studying in a foreign country), obtaining a balanced and diverse sample of participants. In this paper, video quality is evaluated with Single-Stimulus Discrete Quality Evaluation (SSDQE) methodology. Spatial and social presence are evaluated with questionnaires adapted from the literature. Initial empathy is assessed with Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and a questionnaire is designed to evaluate the attitude after the visualization of each video. Attention is evaluated with three questions about the conversations of the contents that had pass/fail answers. The results from the subjective test validate the proposed methodology in immersive communications, showing that video quality experiments can be adapted to conditions imposed by experiments focused on the evaluation of socioemotional features in terms of contents of long-duration, different acquisition perspectives, and genre. In addition, the positive results related to the sense of social and spatial presence imply that technology can be relevant in the analyzed use case. Other main result is that the acquisition perspective greatly influences social presence. Finally, the annotated dataset, Student Experiences Around the World dataset (SEAW-dataset), obtained from the experiment is made publicly available for the research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

License plate detection is a key problem in intelligent transportation systems. Recently, many deep learning-based networks have been proposed and achieved incredible success in general object detection, such as faster R-CNN, SSD, and R-FCN. However, directly applying these deep general object detection networks on license plate detection without modifying may not achieve good enough performance. This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based framework for license plate detection in traffic scene images based on predicted anchor region proposal and balanced feature pyramid. In the proposed framework, ResNet-34 architecture is first adopted for generating the base convolution feature maps. A balanced feature pyramid generation module is then used to generate balanced feature pyramid, of which each feature level obtains equal information from other feature levels. Furthermore, this paper designs a multiscale region proposal network with a novel predicted location anchor scheme to generate high-quality proposals. Finally, a detection network which includes a region of interest pooling layer and fully connected layers is adopted to further classify and regress the coordinates of detected license plates. Experimental results on public datasets show that the proposed approach achieves better detection performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods on license plate detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth of the licensing of Intellectual Property rights in the global economy, the insolvency treatment of licensing agreements has also taken on greater importance. This paper analyses the treatment of intellectual property licences under the European Commission's new Directive Proposal 2022/0408/COD, the flagship law of the European insolvency harmonisation project. The paper focuses on the Proposal's approach in cases where the debtor's business, or part of it, is sold as a going concern in the pre-pack context. It contrasts the European response to the US Bankruptcy Code, which serves as a significant source of inspiration, and provides examples of how some EU Member States handle such cases. In substance, the paper examines the Commission's steps towards harmonising the treatment of IP licences in insolvency. Considering the insolvency context and the needs of the parties to the licence, it critically analyses not only the expediency of implementing specific regulations but also the effectiveness of the means employed. Finally, the paper provides some suggestions to amend the Proposal and highlights the necessity to revisit the broader debate over the treatment of IP licences in European insolvency legislation in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel recognition scheme for vehicle make and model recognition (VMMR) from frontal images of vehicles. In general, we introduce some domain knowledge to cope with this task. The structural components contained in the frontal appearance of vehicles present different visual characteristics and their discriminating ability varies when vehicle models belonging to the same brand or different brands are compared. In light of the particularities, we take advantage of the varying discriminating ability of these structural components to perform the recognition task sequentially in two stages. At the first stage, the logo sub-region (which is one of the component-related sub-regions in the region of interest) is applied to classify the vehicle models at the brand level. Different from the traditional brand-level classification that the models of the same brand are considered as a single class, in this paper, multiple sub-classes in one brand class are allowed, since the intra-brand models also exhibit a certain degree of diversity. In this way, the problem of inter-class similarity is remitted. At the second stage, several customized classifiers are trained for each sub-class in the light of the discriminant ability of the remaining sub-regions. The proposed approach has been tested on a large-scale vehicle image database collected in this paper and has achieved the state-of-the-art results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The license plate recognition system (LPRS) has been widely adopted in daily life due to its efficiency and high accuracy. Deep neural networks are commonly used in the LPRS to improve the recognition accuracy. However, researchers have found that deep neural networks have their own security problems that may lead to unexpected results. Specifically, they can be easily attacked by the adversarial examples that are generated by adding small perturbations to the original images, resulting in incorrect license plate recognition. There are some classic methods to generate adversarial examples, but they cannot be adopted on LPRS directly. In this paper, we modify some classic methods to generate adversarial examples that could mislead the LPRS. We conduct extensive evaluations on the HyperLPR system and the results show that the system could be easily attacked by such adversarial examples. In addition, we show that the generated images could also attack the black-box systems; we show some examples that the Baidu LPR system also makes incorrect recognitions. We hope this paper could help improve the LPRS by realizing the existence of such adversarial attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the improvement of our country's economic level and quality of life, the numbers and scales of highway networks and motor vehicles are constantly expanding, which makes the current road traffic burden more and more serious. As an important means of traffic automation management, license plate recognition (LPR) technology plays an important role in traffic surveillance and control. However, the recognition rate and accuracy of the traditional license plate recognition methods still need to be improved. In the case of poor surrounding environment, it is prone to localization failure, vehicle license plate recognition errors or unrecognizable phenomena. Wavelet transform, as another landmark signal processing method after Fourier transform, has been widely used in the field of image processing. In China, the number of horizontal lines is usually larger than that of vertical lines. If the two vertical boundaries of the license plate can be detected successfully, the four angles of the license plate can be determined efficiently to complete the license plate positioning. In view of the advantages of wavelet transform technology and the characteristics of vehicle license plate, in this paper, a vehicle license plate recognition algorithm based on wavelet transform and vertical edge matching is proposed. The edge of the license plate is detected by wavelet transform technology, and then the license plate is located by vertical edge matching technology. After the location is realized, the characters are segmented by vertical projection method and the characters are recognized by improved BP neural network algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed vehicle license plate recognition algorithm based on wavelet transform and vertical edge matching performs well in algorithm performance, which provides a good reference for the development of vehicle license plate recognition system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inverter-based resources respond differently than synchronous generation sources during power system faults, challenging line protection reliability. Part I of this paper presented cases that challenge line protection schemes. In this paper (Part II), we provide solutions that can be applied to gain a substantial improvement in reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a new concept proposed by the radio spectrum policy group in order to optimize spectrum usage: a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) can access temporarily to other incumbent's spectrum after obtaining a license. The licensing process is made via an auction mechanism. The mechanisms proposed in the literature for the LSA context are one-shot auction mechanisms which allocate all the available spectrum as a unique block. In this paper, we first show how to increase the performance of those auctions (in terms of revenue, efficiency and fairness of the allocation) while preserving truthful bidding, by splitting spectrum and converting single block auctions into multi-block auctions. Simulation results illustrate how appropriately choosing the number of blocks allows to increase the aforementioned metrics. Second, we show how to convert one-shot mechanisms to equivalent ascending mechanisms (in terms of allocations and payments) so that we add transparency and privacy to the auction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network virtualization allows the coexistence of multiple network slices over a shared physical infrastructure, each delivering a service with own requirements in terms of quality of service, coverage, and time span. Spectrum is an expensive commodity, so it must be managed among these slices in the most efficient way. However, current spectrum sharing techniques are too rigid to address all combinations of service requirements and properly exploit the new air interface flexibility and network deployment options introduced by the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks. In this paper, we extend the state of the art first by proposing a novel spectrum sharing scheme that supports an unlimited number of radio networks. Second, we propose a 5G compliant novel service-based network management architecture to integrate Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for Radio Resource Management (RRM), including spectrum sharing. Finally, we propose a new three-stage ML framework that exploits forecasting, clustering and reinforcement learning algorithms to implement the proposed spectrum sharing scheme. Our proposed solution can allow an arbitrary number of 5G network slices to share spectrum more effectively and more dynamically either with each other or with other radio networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sidelnikov sequences, a kind of cyclotomic sequences with many desired properties such as low correlation and variable alphabet sizes, can be employed to construct a polyphase sequence family that has many applications in high-speed data communications. Recently, cyclotomic numbers have been used to investigate the linear complexity of Sidelnikov sequences, mainly about binary ones, although the limitation on the orders of the available cyclotomic numbers makes it difficult. This paper continues to study the linear complexity over $\mathbb {F}_{M}$ of $M$ -ary Sidelnikov sequence of period $q-1$ using Hasse derivative, which implies $q=p^{m}$ , $m\geq 1$ and $M|(q-1)$. The $t$ th Hasse derivative formulas are presented in terms of cyclotomic numbers, and some upper bounds on the linear complexity for $M=2$ and 3 are obtained only with some additional restrictions on $q$. Furthermore, concrete illustrations for several families of these sequences, such as $q\equiv 1\pmod {2}$ and $q\equiv 1\pmod {3}$ , show these upper bounds are tight and reachable; especially for $q=2\times 3^{\lambda }+1 (1\leq \lambda \leq 20)$ , the exact linear complexities over $\mathbb {F}_{3}$ of the ternary Sidelnikov sequences are determined; and it turns out that all the linear complexities of the sequences considered are very close to their periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speed limit violation by vehicles is one of the most frequent reasons for road crashes, which take the lives of many people every year, resulting in an increasing demand for video-based vehicle speed estimation systems. One of the biggest challenges to achieve monocular video-based vehicle speed estimation is the projection displacement difference (PDD) problem, where there is a plane disparity between street-level indicators and above-plane feature points of vehicles, thus resulting in unreliable speed estimates. In this paper, a novel motion plane-based approach for vehicle speed estimation is proposed, which addresses the problem of PDD. In the proposed method, we consider the center of a vehicle license plate as the vehicle reference point and estimate the hypothetical plane (named motion plane), on which license plate moves. Subsequently, the plate position is mapped on the motion plane and the displacement is then calculated, thus mitigating the effects of PPD. To estimate the motion plane, a texture-based shape-from-template technique is used. Unlike existing methods, the proposed method needs neither to apply any indicator nor to use any information about extrinsic parameters of the camera. Furthermore, since all the license plates are approximately located on a flat plane, the motion plane can be estimated by using several extracted 3-D points. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art vehicle speed estimation methods, illustrating the efficacy of this approach for achieving reliable vehicle speed estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines computer virtualization as a solution to issues encountered in maintaining HMI and SCADA systems based on commercial off-the-shelf computing hardware. Following a brief primer, this paper outlines issues arising from the rapid advancement of personal and server computing hardware, including automation software conflicts with new operating systems, device driver availability for old operating systems, and migrating backup images to new hardware. Opportunities for improvement are identified in backup and recovery, operator access to computing resources, and prototyping HMI and program changes. The concept of a virtual machine is introduced, and common architectures are examined, followed by the description of an example virtualized control room. Finally, this paper examines the experiences of a multisite cement producer in implementing virtualization in two of their plants. This examination explores the reasoning, advantages, disadvantages, and limitations encountered in moving existing systems to a virtualized platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial micro-expressions indicate brief and subtle facial movements that appear during emotional communication. In comparison to macro-expressions, micro-expressions are more challenging to be analyzed due to the short span of time and the fine-grained changes. In recent years, micro-expression recognition (MER) has drawn much attention because it can benefit a wide range of applications, e.g., police interrogation, clinical diagnosis, depression analysis, and business negotiation. In this survey, we offer a fresh overview to discuss new research directions and challenges these days for MER tasks. For example, we review MER approaches from three novel aspects: macro-to-micro adaptation, recognition based on key apex frames, and recognition based on facial action units. Moreover, to mitigate the problem of limited and biased ME data, synthetic data generation is surveyed for the diversity enrichment of micro-expression data. Since micro-expression spotting can boost micro-expression analysis, the state-of-the-art spotting works are also introduced in this paper. At last, we discuss the challenges in MER research and provide potential solutions as well as possible directions for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cap-and-trade systems, or emission trading systems (ETS), are increasingly adopted by countries and regions to provide economic incentives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of existing ETS are early-stage systems implemented in and after 2013. These early-stage ETS are typically characterised by a focus on few industry sectors, and the employment of free emission allocation schemes including grandfathering and benchmarking. In this paper, we investigate the impact of emission allocation schemes in an early-stage cap-and-trade system in a duopoly market. We show that benchmarking scheme may lead the energy-efficient firm to reserve part of its emission permits, while firms always use up their after-trading permits under grandfathering. We also find that a more stringent emission cap may increase firms' profits rather than decreasing them under both allocation schemes, suggesting a possible cause for windfall profits observed in early-stage ETS. Benchmarking is found to lead to lower emissions compared to those under grandfathering, while it may result in higher or lower firm profits, consumer surplus, and the overall social welfare. Furthermore, under either allocation scheme, allowing emission trading does not affect the total emissions, while it can increase firm profits and consumer surplus and therefore the overall social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel kind of GaN light-emitting diode (LED) with P and N discontinuous ohmic contact electrodes and discontinuous current blocking layer (CBL) is designed and prepared. Multiple contact windows under the N- and P-electrodes formed by etching help realize the discontinuous ohmic contacts with the N-GaN layer and the ITO layer, respectively. Similarly, by etching a plurality of discontinuous openings with the same pitch in the CBL, a discontinuous CBL structure is formed. As compared with traditional structures, the discontinuous ohmic contacts can maximize the number of current paths which allow the carriers to be collected from all four directions, leading to a more uniform current spreading and thermal management. Furthermore, as the contacts are not continuous any longer, some of the otherwise removed materials (such as the active region) lying between the patches are saved. The optoelectronic characteristics, junction temperature, thermal resistance, and infrared thermography measurements are conducted and the current distribution is simulated. The results show that the novel LED structure has better optoelectronic performances and current spreading ability compared to traditional devices. At 150 mA current, the luminous efficiency is 15.2% higher than the traditional LED, the junction temperature is reduced by 4.9%, and the thermal resistance is reduced by 12%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The severity evaluation of UHF signals of partial discharge in GIS is helpful to formulate a maintenance strategy in time, and improve the reliability of power system operation. Most of the evaluation methods are based on structured data, which cannot fully characterize the state of the equipment. In this paper, a method for evaluating the severity of UHF signals of partial discharge in GIS based on semantic analysis is presented. It comprehensively considers the influence of structured data and unstructured text data on the state of equipment, including measured data on partial discharge, relevant information of defects, and equipment operating parameters. Firstly, the severity of UHF signals of partial discharge is defined. According to the on-site detection of substations, a data set containing equipment detection reports and PRPS data is established. Aiming at semantic analysis, Word Embedding is used to associate and encode textual information to reduce the subjectivity of the encoding. Measured data on partial discharge is also combined and analyzed for evaluation. The method proposed is used for case analysis and compared with other methods. The results show that the comprehensive utilization of structured data and unstructured text data can reflect the state of equipment more comprehensively and truthfully, and improve the accuracy of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266) is an emerging successor to the widespread High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) and is shown to double the coding efficiency for the same subjective visual quality. Nevertheless, VVC still adopts the similar hybrid video coding scheme as HEVC and thereby sets the scene for reusing many HEVC coding tools and techniques as is or with minor modifications. This paper explores the feasibility of developing a practical software VVC intra encoder from our open-source Kvazaar HEVC encoder. The outcome of this work is called uvg266 VVC intra encoder that is distributed under the same permissive 3-clause BSD license as Kvazaar. uvg266 inherits the optimized coding flow of Kvazaar and all upgradable Kvazaar intra coding tools, but it also introduces basic VVC intra coding tools not available in HEVC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to describe the implementation details of upgrading an HEVC encoder to a VVC encoder. The rapid development time with promising coding performance make our proposal a viable approach over the encoder development from scratch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a two-way protocol of physical layer security using the method of privacy amplification against eavesdroppers. First we justify our proposed protocol by analyzing the physical layer security provided by the classic wiretap channel model (i.e. one-way protocol). In the Gaussian channels, the classic one-way protocol requires Eve’s channel to be degraded w.r.t. Bob’s channel. However, this channel degradation condition depends on Eve’s location and whether Eve’s receiving antenna is more powerful than Bob’s. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a two-way protocol inspired in IEEE TIT (1993) that eliminates the channel degradation condition. In the proposed two-way protocol, on a first phase, via Gaussian channel, Bob sends randomness to Alice, which is partially leaked to Eve. Then, on a second phase, Alice transmits information to Bob over a public noiseless channel. We derive the secrecy capacity of the two-way protocol when the channel to Eve is also Gaussian. We show that the capacity of the two-way protocol is always positive. We present numerical values of the capacities illustrating the gains obtained by our proposed protocol. We apply our result to simple yet realistic models of satellite communication channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a brief description of the novelty elements that come with Inventor Professional2020 compared to Inventor 2018 applicable in mechanical design. It should be mentioned that, some of the most common commands for 3D modeling and obtaining 2D documentation were chosen, in which the similarities and differences were studied, by applying them to the most representative pieces in [1], the specialized documentation. Works published by colleagues from the department [2], [3], [4], [5] were selected for the study. The choice of the two versions was based on the current situation of the existence of educational licenses for both versions in the Faculty of Engineering and Agronomy in Braila. The second part of the paper presents some aspects on how to achieve 2D documentation using Inventor Professional 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reduce the cost and increase reliability of the vehicle radio-frequency identification and tracking systems, an alternative placement of the interrogator is investigated. Conventional systems make use of an overhead interrogator that reads a tag in a windscreen or a license plate. The alternative approach is to embed the interrogator in the road and exclusively read license plate tags. In this paper, the link budget of such a system is fully characterized assuming the ISO/IEC 18000-63 UHF Type-C RFID standard. The obtained results indicate that a microwave sensor that has an elevated toroidal radiation pattern at around a 20°–30° elevation angle above the horizon is desired. This is a challenging task as road regulations dictate that the sensor cannot exceed a profile of 2.5 cm above the road surface. As an example of a sensor that meets those requirements, a modified discone antenna with an improved impedance matching method is presented. To reduce the antenna’s profile and give the required mechanical strength to withstand the weight of different vehicles on the road, the area between the disc and the cone is filled with Acetal, which has a high dielectric constant. The proposed microwave sensor is fabricated and successfully tested in a real-road environment. The results confirm that the sensor meets the aforementioned strict requirements from the link budget analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Automatic License plate recognition (ALPR) remains a challenging task in face of some difficulties such as multi-line character distribution and license plate (LP) deformation due to camera angles. Most existing ALPR methods either focus on single-line LP or perform horizontal multi-line LP detection and recognition with character-level annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end irregular license plate recognition (EILPR) to detect and recognize the LP of multi-line text or arbitrary shooting angles, using only plate-level annotations for training. In EILPR, a coarse-to-fine strategy is adopted to extract the LP features accurately for sequence recognition. Firstly, a coarse rectangular box of the LP is located, along with the corresponding predicted LP class which is single-line or double-line. Then, considering the fact that a LP mainly generates perspective distortion in the image due to its rigid feature, we propose a new automatic perspective alignment network (APAN) to extract the fine LP features connecting the detection and recognition. For recognition, a location-aware 2D attention based recognition network is performed to recognize the multi-line and multinational LP based on the extracted features. Experiments on several datasets show that EILPR achieves the state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]