Clean Power Players: Landing a Job in Clean Energy

A new, first-of-its-kind guidebook by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offers practical, how-to advice for young people seeking careers in clean energy

A CFD based procedure for airspace integration of small unmanned aircraft within congested areas

Future integration of small unmanned aircraft within an urban airspace requires an a posteriori understanding of the building-induced aerodynamics which could negatively impact on vehicle performance. Moving away from generalised building formations, we model the centre of the city of Glasgow using Star-CCMþ, a commercial CFD package. After establishing a critical turbulent kinetic energy for our vehicle, we analyse the CFD results to determine how best to operate a small unmanned aircraft within this environment. As discovered in a previous study, the spatial distribution of turbulence increases with altitude. It was recommended then that UAVs operate at the minimal allowable altitude within a congested area. As the flow characteristics in an environment are similar, regardless of inlet velocity, we can determine areas within a city which will have consistently low or high values of turbulent kinetic energy. As the distribution of turbulence is dependent on prevailing wind directions, some directions are more favourable than others, even if the wind speed is unchanging. Moving forward we should aim to gather more information about integrated aircraft and how they respond to turbulence in a congested area

Bayesian learning of joint distributions of objects

There is increasing interest in broad application areas in defining flexible joint models for data having a variety of measurement scales, while also allowing data of complex types, such as functions, images and documents. We consider a general framework for nonparametric Bayes joint modeling through mixture models that incorporate dependence across data types through a joint mixing measure. The mixing measure is assigned a novel infinite tensor factorization (ITF) prior that allows flexible dependence in cluster allocation across data types. The ITF prior is formulated as a tensor product of stick-breaking processes. Focusing on a convenient special case corresponding to a Parafac factorization, we provide basic theory justifying the flexibility of the proposed prior and resulting asymptotic properties. Focusing on ITF mixtures of product kernels, we develop a new Gibbs sampling algorithm for routine implementation relying on slice sampling. The methods are compared with alternative joint mixture models based on Dirichlet processes and related approaches through simulations and real data applications.Comment: Appearing in Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2013, Scottsdale, AZ, US

System Identification of multi-rotor UAVs using echo state networks

Controller design for aircraft with unusual configurations presents unique challenges, particularly in extracting valid mathematical models of the MRUAVs behaviour. System Identification is a collection of techniques for extracting an accurate mathematical model of a dynamic system from experimental input-output data. This can entail parameter identification only (known as grey-box modelling) or more generally full parameter/structural identification of the nonlinear mapping (known as black-box). In this paper we propose a new method for black-box identification of the non-linear dynamic model of a small MRUAV using Echo State Networks (ESN), a novel approach to train Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

A Neo-Institutional Assessment of Cooperative Evolution: Comparing the Australian Wheat Board and the Fonterra Dairy Group

Agribusiness,

Construction procurement systems : a linkage with project organisational models

This paper constitutes a literature review undertaken at the start of a two and a half year EPSRC funded research project. As such, its purpose is to present the details of the ‘re-search’concerning construction procurement and project organizational design. The paper shows that the ‘post -Latham’construction industry provides several new developments (client power, partnering, concurrent engineering etc) which are altering the construction project process, and therefore prove worthy vehicles for investigation into project organizational structures