Biofuel systems may represent a promising strategy to combat climate change by replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and transportation. First-generation biofuels from sugar starch crops for ethanol (a gasoline substitute) oilseed biodiesel petroleum diesel have come under increasing levels of scrutiny due the uncertainty associated with estimation impacts biofuels, such as indirect ...

Anthropogenic features such as urbanization, roads, and power lines, are increasing in western United States landscapes in response to rapidly growing human populations. However, their spatial effects have not been evaluated. Our goal was to model the human footprint across the western United States. We first delineated the actual area occupied by anthropogenic features, the physical effect are...

The estimation of remaining useful life is significant in the context of prognostics and health monitoring, and the prediction of remaining useful life is essential for online operations and decision-making. However, it is challenging to accurately predict the remaining useful life in practical aerospace applications due to the presence of various uncertainties that affect prognostic calculatio...

One of the most efficient ways of generating goal-directed walking motions is synthesising the final motion based on footprints. Nevertheless, current implementations have not examined the generation of continuous motion based on footprints, where different behaviours can be generated automatically. Therefore, in this paper a flexible approach for footprint-driven locomotion composition is pres...

In this paper we examine the issue of optimizing disk usage and scheduling large-scale scientific workflows onto distributed resources where the workflows are data-intensive, requiring large amounts of data storage, and the resources have limited storage resources. Our approach is two-fold: we minimize the amount of space a workflow requires during execution by removing data files at runtime wh...

Global warming is accelerating and the world urgently needs a shift to clean and renewable energy. Hydropower is currently the largest renewable source of electricity, but its contribution to climate change mitigation is not yet fully understood. Hydroelectric reservoirs are a source of biogenic greenhouse gases and in individual cases can reach the same emission rates as thermal power plants. ...

Developers create paths for users to tread. Some users will stay on the beaten track; others will diverge and take risky shortcuts. If user-preferred and developer-created paths diverge too much, it is time for the developer to consider a new path. A case in point is the humble password. They fill an important developer need: a cheap and easy mechanism to control access and enforce accountabili...

The success of a case-based reasoning system depends critically on the performance of the retrieval algorithm used and, specifically, on its efficiency, competence, and quality characteristics. In this paper we describe a novel retrieval technique that is guided by a model of case competence and that, as a result, benefits from superior efficiency, competence and quality features.

We investigate the potential of foot biometric features based on geometry, shape and texture and present algorithms for a prototype rotation invariant verification system. An introduction to origins and fields of application for footprint-based personal recognition is accompanied by a comparison with traditional hand biometry systems. Image enhancement and feature extraction steps emphasizing o...