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The article explores whether sociotechnical imaginaries of digitalization as inevitable accelerating development can be traced in Denmark’s official policy papers concerning digitalization 2015–2020. It identifies imperatives of speed, acceleration and agility equal to what has been described as a corporate data imaginary as well as tropes of an imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution and inevitable exponential technological development and disruption. The empirical analysis discovers a shift in the studied period mid-2018, before which inevitabilism is prominent and after which the focus on non-economic values increases and the aim of influencing the development, instead of adapting to it, emerges. The article then addresses how imperatives of acceleration and narratives of inevitabilism may be considered problematic from a democratic point of view employing Hartmut Rosa’s critical diagnosis of the acceleration society and the notion of discursive closure. Finally, it discusses the empirical findings in light of technological determinism and constructivism inherent in the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries and introduces a sociotechnical selectionist theory allowing both for human agency in technological development while also providing a mechanism for explaining the emergence of law-like technological trends, as Moore’s Law, at macro level.

In this paper, we present a new scheme for implementing virtual keyboards, which uses only two to four motion-recognition rings per hand and a two-dimensional keyboard template (e.g., an A4 size paper with printed key positions). It has the benefit of portability, customizability, and low-cost when compared with existing approaches. Essentially, we have shown that wearing two wireless IoT rings on the middle phalanges of two fingers of each hand, users can input the alphabetic characters into a computing device by typing on a flat paper on a desk, and potentially in mid-air. We have demonstrated that two rings are sufficient in capturing the gestures and motions of all fingers in a typing hand for keystrokes recognition. A single wireless IoT ring, which weighs 7.8 grams, consists of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) unit, a micro inertial measurement unit (mIMU), and a cell battery. The 3-axes attitude angles and the Z-axis acceleration of each ring are adopted as the features for keystroke recognition. The overall keystroke recognition accuracy rate can reach as high as 94.8% when two IoT rings are worn by a user on each hand; this accuracy rate increases to 98.6%, when four rings are worn on each typing hand.

Free fall motion in air medium is only influenced by gravitation acceleration. However, there are several variables that caused the observations to be different with the concept. Variables, such as air drag and terminal velocity, are often teachers not presented in detail, causing misconceptions. This study aims to develop a simple experiment on free fall motion by identifying air drag and terminal velocity. The data in this study is the video of free fall motion of paper and scraper analyzed using Tracker video analyze. From the video analyzed, information is obtained in the form of time (t), track (l, θ), and velocity (v) of the object. This study shows that the air drag force increase unto the terminal velocity. The calculation of the drag coefficient giving the number of the paper 2,16 and the scraper 2,10. According to data analyzed, the air drag force is affected by the mass (m), area (A), and the air drag force (FD) with the linear correlation until it reaches the terminal velocity. The result of this study may use as references of free fall motion experiment with other objects and analyze.

With the trend of adopting FPGAs in data centers, various FPGA acceleration platforms have been developed in recent years. Each server could incorporate one or many of these FPGAs at different compute hierarchy levels to match its workload intensity. FPGAs could either be used as IO-attached accelerators or be closely integrated with CPU as on-chip co-processors. For a more data-centric approach, an FPGA could be moved closer to the data medium (RAM or disk) and serve as a near-memory or near-storage accelerator. In this work, we present a quantitative model and in-depth analysis of application characteristics to determine when an application is more suitable for each acceleration hierarchy. We analyze 18 benchmarks from six domains and create a preliminary guideline for both application and hardware developers.

Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) provides approximate solution to combinatorial optimization problems. It encodes the cost function using a $p$ -level quantum circuit where each level consists a problem Hamiltonian followed by a mixing Hamiltonian. Despite the promises, few real-world applications (besides the pedagogical MaxCut problem) have exploited QAOA. The success of QAOA relies on the classical optimizer, variational parameter setting, and quantum circuit design and compilation. In this study, we implement QAOA and analyze its performance for a broader Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulation to solve real-word applications such as, partially occluded object detection problem. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of above influential factors on QAOA performance. We propose a 3-level improvement of hybrid quantum-classical optimization for object detection. We achieve more than 13X execution speedup by choosing L-BFGS-B as classical optimizer at the first level and 5.50X additional speedup by exploiting parameter symmetry and more than 1.23X acceleration using parameter regression at the second level. We empirically show that the circuit will achieve better fidelity by optimally rescheduling gate operations (especially for deeper circuits) at the third level.

We reported that we developed a new air permeability tester with which we could measure the acceleration of the air permeability (AAP) of coated paper under high temperatures and high pressures during a short time. And we found that AAP was more strongly related to the blistering tendency of coated paper, before.In this paper, we used various base papers, and studied the influence of base paper to blistering resistance of coated paper with AAP. Then we found that a new factor, the slope which was obtained through AAP and coating weight (less than 5 g/m2 on side) plot, was strongly related to the blistering tendency. So, the result indicates that the interface property between base paper and coating layer has an influence upon the blistering resistance.

Electronic line-shafting control has demonstrated very promising features when applied to paper machine drives. To apply this new control methodology, it is necessary to develop a starting procedure for each individual section and a method for setting the parameters of the virtual line-shaft drive and in-shafts. This paper proposes and evaluates startup and commissioning procedures for electronically line-shafted paper machine drives. The procedure for acceleration of the individual sections is implemented using virtual variable-ratio gearboxes that emulate the physical clutches and conical pulleys used in the era of line-shafts. System stiffness is implemented using virtual in-shafts with active damping. Evaluation shows that the proposed virtual clutch/conical pulley assembly and active damping allow smooth acceleration of each section and maintain well-behaved response during load disturbances for all operating conditions, even with different numbers of sections effectively connected.

With the continual growth of low-cost and high-throughput DNA sequence technology, the scale and amount of next-generation sequencing (NGS) datasets are continually increasing in many genomics research areas. Shotgun metagenomics sequencing provides comprehensive information on microorganisms, based on complex samples of the ecosystem. Due to challenges of its scale and computational complexity, efficient sequence processing and analyzing tools are needed. In this paper, we propose a novel high-performance shotgun metagenomics sequence analysis engine for the task of sequence comparison. It includes two major components. First, a customized shifting database, which is optimized from any existing DNA sequence dataset. Second, a high-performance sequence computation algorithm that utilizes the customized shifting reference database and accelerates GPU parallel computing. We elaborated upon the efficiency and computational complexity of our proposed approach in an HPC server, which has eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs. We also conducted a case study to detect viral sequences from patients' blood samples. Our experimental result shows that we obtain similar accuracy to the conventional BLAST method, but with a computational speed that is about twenty times faster.

This paper focuses upon the press section of a paper machine and describes a neural network vibration-based condition monitoring system for providing advance warning of faults in the felts. These are extremely important components of the paper machine as they are responsible for guiding the paper through the press nips. Any deterioration in the felts may result in paper breakage and machine shut-downs with a resulting fall in productivity. The need for tighter control of the manufacturing process is thus the main motivation for this work. The system developed makes use of spectral analysis of the raw vibration signals. This involves the technique of acceleration enveloping for isolating the spectral components that reflect the process defects. Since visual examination of the spectra for detecting subtle changes in the early stages is both difficult and impractical, a peak detection algorithm has been designed. Its purpose is to extract the relevant features from each spectrum. These are then fed into a neural network classifier for discriminating between the fault and the no-fault conditions. The system is demonstrated to be successful for detecting felt deterioration in its early stages when assessed on industrial data. Other benefits include the ease of on-line implementation and its possible extension to a wide range of mechanical and rotating equipment.

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) project is a new generation multi-component instrument, to be built at 4410 meters of altitude in the Sichuan province of China, with the aim to study with unprecedented sensitivity the spec trum, the composition and the anisotropy of cosmic rays in the energy range between 10$^{12}$ and 10$^{18}$ eV, as well as to act simultaneously as a wide aperture (one stereoradiant), continuously-operated gamma ray telescope in the energy range between 10$^{11}$ and $10^{15}$ eV. The experiment will be able of continuously surveying the TeV sky for steady and transient sources from 100 GeV to 1 PeV, t hus opening for the first time the 100-1000 TeV range to the direct observations of the high energy cosmic ray sources. In addition, the different observables (electronic, muonic and Cherenkov/fluorescence components) that will be measured in LHAASO will allow to investigate origin, acceleration and propagation of the radiation through a measurement of energy spec trum, elemental composition and anisotropy with unprecedented resolution. The remarkable sensitivity of LHAASO in cosmic rays physics and gamma astronomy would play a key-role in the comprehensive general program to explore the High Energy Universe. LHAASO will allow important studies of fundamental physics (such as indirect dark matter search, Lorentz invariance violation, quantum gravity) and solar and heliospheric physics. In this document we introduce the concept of LHAASO and the main science goals, providing an overview of the project.

The unitized loads are the major form of the packed product transportation, and most of the cases the packages are fixed to the pallet with straps, stretch film or these combinations. During transport, various vibrations occur in the packaging-product system, which can damage the products. Many of studies focus on the nature of these vibrations, but the vibration varies between the layers of stacked packaging is not fully researched. This paper focuses on the different motion of the layers in the unitized loads in function of the fixing mode to the pallet. Therefore, multiple unitized loads were built from the same corrugated paper boxes in three layers with various fixing mode, to measure each layer motion during vibration. To carry out the simulation procedure, acceleration on each layer was recorded under sine and random vibration simulation. The recorded data shows, which layer motion is the most disparate from the excited motion, which fixing variant caused this difference.

The paper focuses on the robust control design of a look-ahead cruise control system. The aim of the look-ahead control is to consider the topographic conditions and speed regulations of the oncoming road sections. The look-ahead cruise control leads to an optimization method, which generates a fuel and time optimal reference speed for the vehicle. It requires external topographic and road information, and measurements concerning the vehicle, such as speed and acceleration. Since the signals of the vehicle are considered in the generation of the reference speed, the generator has an impact on the stability of the cruise control system. In the paper a robust H∞ cruise control design method is proposed, which considers the efect of the reference speed generation, and guarantees the stability and the speed tracking performance of the entire system. The efciency of the method is analyzed through a simulation example with real highway data.

When dealing with material classification in baggage at airports, Dual-Energy Computed Tomography (DECT) allows characterization of any given material with coefficients based on two attenuative effects: Compton scattering and photoelectric absorption. However, straightforward projection-domain decomposition methods for this characterization often yield poor reconstructions due to the high dynamic range of material properties encountered in an actual luggage scan. Hence, for better reconstruction quality under a timing constraint, we propose a splitting-based, GPU-accelerated, statistical DECT reconstruction algorithm. Compared to prior art, our main contribution lies in the significant acceleration made possible by separating reconstruction and decomposition within an ADMM framework. Experimental results, on both synthetic and real-world baggage phantoms, demonstrate a significant reduction in time required for convergence.

Display driver is a basic driver of a system, in order to port WINCE to the platform based on e-paper, we developed a E-paper driver for WINCE. This paper analyzed display characteristics of e-paper in detail and compared the Apollo controller with others. Considering the e-paper's refresh rate is too slow, we put forward a specific solution - a passive-refresh display strategy for the display controller- which has a much better user experience than refreshing at a slow static rate. In the end, we implemented the e-paper device driver for WINCE platform, which satisfies screen printing perfectly.

When a liquid droplet is placed on a sufficiently hot surface, it will be levitated by the vapor cushion between the droplet and the hot surface due to the Leidenfrost effect. Such Leidenfrost-based levitation can greatly reduce friction and thus offers a promising approach for low-friction devices. In this work, we demonstrated a self-propelled rotational Leidenfrost rotor made of wet paper with asymmetric mass distribution. The rotor has shown the capability of reaching angular velocities of more than 30 rad/s and prolonged the rotation duration through refueling with water. We experimentally investigated the influence of mass repartition and substrate heating temperature on the rotation behavior of the rotor. It was found that both the initial acceleration and the maximum angular velocity increase with the increasing mass ratio of the connector over the evaporator within the rotor and the substrate heating temperature. A theoretical model was proposed to simulate the trend, and the simulated results are in good agreement with the experimental results. The paper-based Leidenfrost rotor provides an alternative way to utilize the Leidenfrost effect for exploring self-propelled movement and relevant applications such as surface cleaning and rotary heat engines.

It is noted that increasing the speed of a paper machine has a definite effect on the drive system requirements. Determining the requirements on the drive system by taking data of the existing paper machine is explored. Calculations using the data are presented along with the analysis of the results. Consideration is given to the horsepower (HP) requirements, motor ratings and power unit ratings with respect to HP, voltage, field ratings, and overload rating. Forms for gathering data are included with example calculations. Other elements of the drive system are discussed relative to the paper machine speed-up. >

Graphics processing unit (GPU) based fast calculation method for computer generated spherical hologram (CGSH) of a real-existing object is proposed. Three-dimensional (3D) point cloud is constructed by capturing a real-existing object from multiple directions using a depth camera. The GPU based calculation is used in both hologram generation part and numerical reconstruction part of the CGSH. The improved calculation efficiency is verified by comparing the computation speed between central processing unit (CPU) based and GPU based implementation.

To improve the stability of a Paper-Transferring Mechanism (PTM), a profound understanding must be made on its vibration characteristics, on which based, a modified design was made. Through kinetic and dynamic analysis of the PTM, the natural frequencies were obtained based on the vibration signal detection and noise signal analysis. To reduce the vibration response of the PTM, first is to reduce its maximum acceleration and reduce the quality of moving parts and improve its quality distribution, then structural modification to the wallboards and pull beams of the platform should be made to render its inherent frequencies from its working frequencies.