One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

This is a short summary of the work I did for 6 weeks as a summer intern with Conor Houghton. The topic of the internship was spike sorting, in particular to test an algorithm suggested by Dr.Houghton. I’ll first briefly describe spike sorting, at least my understanding of it. A few small biological details (which I’m sure are a simplification) a neuron fires ‘spikes’ of voltages; different typ...

Policy makers need information to describe and understand a situation involving problematic drug use, follow trends over time, design appropriate interventions and evaluate the results of the action taken. Monitoring drug use and drug problems involves complex information, based mostly on observational data and epidemiological indicators. Dynamic models can be used to generate estimates where d...

Like many primary products, coffee has long been characterised as a commodity with falling terms of trade and volatile prices. Yet in recent years there has been growing product differentiation in final markets, with premium prices being earned and providing high and sustainable incomes. So far these product rents have been almost entirely appropriated by residents of high income economies. How...

The Group on Earth Observation (GEO) Model Web initiative utilizes a Model as a Service approach to increase model access and sharing. It relies on gradual, organic growth leading towards dynamic webs of interacting models, analogous to the World Wide Web. The long term vision is for a consultative infrastructure that can help address “what if” and other questions that decision makers and other...

We present an approach to detect network configuration errors, which combines the benefits of two prior approaches. Like prior techniques that analyze configuration files, our approach can find errors proactively, before the configuration is applied, and answer “what if” questions. Like prior techniques that analyze data-plane snapshots, our approach can check a broad range of forwarding proper...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

Design and implementation of generic libraries in C++ are based on conceptual specifications—what if such specifications have to change? In a quite practical sense, this question arises because of a new proposal for iterator concepts that is under discussion among C++ library developers. Given the fundamental role of iterator concepts, it is important to anticipate which impact the proposed cha...

Contingency analysis (CA) as an inherent function of system security assessment is critical for detecting underlying problems in a power system. More frequent CA computation is required in the deregulated power markets to monitor the state of the system under “what if” situations in view of the fact that the power systems are now operated closer to their limits imposed by the increasing number ...

If you were going on a weight loss diet, as so many of us have, you would ask a few hard questions about any program that a friend or physician asked you to try. First, you would want to know what the diet is (“Atkins? South Beach? What’s that?”) Next, you would want to know if it works (“How much weight have people lost on that diet? Really?!”) Finally, you might ask, what do I need to do to m...