In addition to real field trips and education virtual field trips are an excellent tool to convey scientific knowledge concerning geography. This paper describes the scientifical, technical and didactical approaches of the web-based virtual excursion in the real world of a former mining area. Numerous interactive functions and knowledge tests support the students’ thinking and learning in a 3D ...

Consider the problem of protecting endangered species by selecting patches of land to be used for conservation purposes. Typically, the availability of patches changes over time, and recommendations must be made dynamically. This is a challenging prototypical example of a sequential optimization problem under uncertainty in computational sustainability. Existing techniques do not scale to probl...

Exploiting parallelism is a key strategy for speeding up computation. However, on hard combinatorial problems, such a strategy has been surprisingly challenging due to the intricate variable interactions. In this paper we introduce a novel way in which parallelism can be used to exploit hidden structure of hard combinatorial problems, orthogonal to divide-andconquer and portfolio approaches. We...

Over the last few decades, the systematic approach of knowledge transfer from biological concept generators to technical applications has received increasing attention, particularly because marketable bio-derived developments are often described as sustainable. The objective of this paper is to rationalize and refine the discussion about bio-derived developments also with respect to sustainabil...

SUMMER 2014 31 Ecological processes that occur at global scales are among the most impressive natural phenomena on Earth; they link environments across the globe and capture the imagination of observers. For example, billions of North American birds, representing more than 400 species, migrate annually, often thousands of miles, frequently under the cover of darkness, between breeding and nonbr...

Despite the growing growth of technology, handwritten signature has been selected as the first option between biometrics by users. In this paper, a new methodology for offline handwritten signature verification and recognition based on the Shearlet transform and transfer learning is proposed. Since, a large percentage of handwritten signatures are composed of curves and the performance of a sig...

An investigation is reported on the importance of integrating sustainability with manufacturing and design, along with other objectives such as function, competitiveness, profitability and productivity. The need of utilizing appropriate tools like design for environment, life cycle assessment and other environmentally sound practices that are cognizant of the entire life cycle of a process or p...