Due to the impact of time-dependent unit unavailability, the testing strategies (e.g., simultaneous or staggered testing) have significant effect on the system unavailability for complex standby systems. Several testing strategies have been studied to minimize average system unavailability for certain systems. For example, uniformly staggered testing has been shown to be the best for two identi...

This paper describes the work done in the framework of the VIDIVIDEO European project in terms of audio event detection. Our first experiments concerned the detection of nonvoice sounds, such as birds, machines, traffic, water and steps. Given the unavailability of a corpus labelled in terms of audio events, we used a relatively small sound effect corpus for training. Our initial experiments wi...

Based on the renewal process theory we develop a decomposition method to analyze the reliability of the repair facility in an n-unit series system with vacations. Using this approach, we study the unavailability and the mean replacement number during 0, t of the repair facility. The method proposed in this work is novel and concise, which can make us see clearly the structures of the facility i...

Examining the scientific process in relation to endangered data, data reuse, and sharing is crucial in facilitating scientific workflow. Deterioration, format obsolescence, and insufficient metadata for discovery are significant problems leading to loss of scientific data. The research presented in this paper considers these potentially lost data. Four one-hour focus groups and a demographic su...

Agricultural production in Ghana experienced a steady decline until the early 1980s when it came to a virtual standstill. Although this trend has since reversed and food production is growing at 2.8% annually (GPRS, 2002), it still falls behind Ghana’s population growth rate of almost 3% (Assenso-Okyere, 2001). None the less, it is estimated that only 20% of agricultural land is under cultivati...

Motivation In traditional energy harvesting applications, sensor nodes are able to store any excess energy in a storage device such as battery or supercapacitor for future use. If correctly dimensioned, such a system will guarantee the node’s operation during periods of energy unavailability. More recently, a radically different research line has emerged which focuses on batteryless, energy-dri...

We propose the demonstration of Keymantic, a system for keyword-based searching in relational databases that does not require a-priori knowledge of instances held in a database. It finds numerous applications in situations where traditional keyword-based searching techniques are inapplicable due to the unavailability of the database contents for the construction of the required indexes.

The aim of this work is to assess the performance of a maintenance policy when a stochastic model of the life of the component of interest is known, but relies on parameters that are imprecisely known, and only through information elicited from experts. The case in which the information used to feed the model comes from a single expert has been investigated by the authors in a previous work. Th...