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Molecules are serious candidates for building hardware for quantum computers. They can encode quantum information onto electron or nuclear spins and some of them show important features as the scalability of the number of qubits and a universal set of quantum gates. In this paper we present our advances in the development of a classical simulation infrastructure for molecular Quantum Computing: starting from the definition of simplified models taking into account the main physical features of each analyzed molecule, quantum gates are defined over these models, thus permitting to take into account the real behavior of each technology during the simulation. An interface with a hardware-agnostic description language has been also developed. The knowledge of the behavior of real systems permits to optimize the design of quantum circuits at both physical and compilation levels. Elementary quantum algorithms have been simulated on three different molecular technologies by changing the physical parameters of polarization and manipulation and quantum circuit design strategies. Results confirm the dependency of the fidelity of the results on both levels, thus proving that the choice of optimal operating points and circuit optimization techniques as virtual-Z gates are fundamental for ensuring the execution of quantum circuits with negligible errors.

In network management architectures of 5G and IoT networks, standardization groups often consider the network resource virtualization layer between the physical network and the SDN controller, as a means to allow deployment and placement of network services with their virtual network functions. However, the following question arises: is this layer enough to react to real-time changes originating from customers or the network without interrupting the service? We consider that a dynamic architecture should allow different and evolving assemblies to be provisioned during a session, in order to meet modification requests without requiring total redesign of the network service. Therefore, in this study, we propose an enhanced architecture. This novel architecture adds a network virtualization layer above the SDN controller with its associated orchestrator. Then, efficiently distributing orchestration among the different layers ensures network autonomy. In this context, we show how real-time service modifications and network failures are handled without losing the existing services and how network management gains additional dynamicity and flexibility.

In this paper a closed loop automatic tuning procedure for the velocity control of oscillatory mechatronic systems is proposed. The transfer function of the system is estimated relying only on the measurements on the motor side, resonances are identified and biquadratic filters and the PID controller are tuned in order to improve the pre-existing control system by reducing the oscillations on the load side. Experimental results obtained with a Hardware-In-the-Loop setup show the effectiveness of the method.

Network slicing is one of the pillars of the upcoming 5G systems. It promises enablers towards providing customized services to users having different profiles and needs (individuals, machines, tier service providers,…) through the use of new infrastructure sharing models which enables multi-provider and multi-tenancy models. We propose methods to model network slicing approaches where we draw a parallel with the IT virtualization theory of "Popek and Goldberg" to introduce a network virtualization model that is compliant with three main characteristics, namely isolation, recursiveness, and independence. To realize the miss-addressed networking aspects of network slicing, we rely on on Network Virtualization, Network Function Virtualization, Software Defined Networking, and Segment Routing protocols. We propose to use a distributed approach to support network slicing end-to-end challenges and describe the concept and the sustainability of such network slicing methods.

This paper presents the design and kinematic analysis of a 6-DOF foldable/deployable Delta-like parallel manipulator, with a spherical wrist, for a lightweight Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (I-AUV). To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first paper to propose the application of a parallel manipulator for underwater vehicles. Most of all underwater manipulators used nowadays are serial. However, parallel manipulators present some interesting features when compared to the serial ones. Lightweight underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS) suffers from disturbances due to several underwater effects, among them, the drag caused by the manipulator motion. When applied to terrestrial and aerial mobile manipulation, parallel manipulators can quickly compensate some disturbances thanks to their geometry (thin links, drives located at the base) and fast motion. Based on these applications and considering that the drag effect can be minimised with a parallel manipulator, this paper proposes a Delta with an optimised geometry, which can be folded for transportation and navigation and deployed for intervention.

A design metric is presented for optimization of antenna positions of mutually incoherent array layouts. The proposed metric is based on a generalized matched-filter response that coincides with the atom-selection criterion of Block-Orthogonal Matching Pursuit. An effective ambiguity function is derived that results from a weighted average of the ambiguity functions associated to each coherent set of Tx and Rx elements. The design involves a tractable constrained optimization of such ambiguity function, over hypothetical DoAs to identify the combined sidelobes, and over antenna positions, for a given number of Tx and Rx elements, spatial constraints and desired field-of-view. Applications include the design of arrays in any dimensions thanks to the versatility of group-sparse reconstruction, including MIMO arrays and near- or far-field models for DoA estimation. Several scenarios of automotive radar are considered for the application of the technique. The resulting incoherent apertures exhibit sidelobe cancellation and similar or even better performance than larger individual arrays.

International audience; Information network modeling is nowadays a popular area of research. Especially, the introduction of virtualization technologies is changing the lifecycle of systems. Virtualization techniques allow distinguishing different levels: applications, networks, and equipment. The design of new virtual networks must consider the requirements of all these levels in a complementary fashion. Quality of Service (QoS) is still the one of the main key feature to be integrated. In this paper, we focus on the virtualized environments where we define a generic concept, called the VirtualElement. Indeed, we are interested in the representation of information enabling the automation of deployment, monitoring and management tasks for virtual networks. For this purpose we characterize the VirtualElement by constrains representing its functional and non-functional behavior. We apply our model at different phases of lifecycle of virtual networks by defining the service profiling. We propose a translation of the virtual network into an OVF file.

The advantages of using C, He and O ions as therapeutical beam particles in Particle Therapy is related to their enhanced Relative Biological Effectiveness and Oxygen Enhancement Ratio, resulting in an improved efficacy in damaging the cancerous cells. However, an accurate on-line control of the dose release spatial distribution is required to spare the healthy tissues surrounding the tumor area, preventing undesired damages caused by, for example, morphological changes occurred in the patient during the treatment with respect to the initial CT scan. This monitor technology is currently missing in clinical practice, and several studies are being performed to develop beam range verification systems exploiting the detection of the emitted secondary radiation. Charged secondary particles, produced by the projectile fragmentation in the collisions with the patient tissues, represent an interesting chance for C, He and O treatments since they are also emitted at large angles with respect to the beam direction and can be detected with high efficiency in a nearly background free environment. The Dose Profiler detector is a scintillating fibre tracker that allows an online charged fragments reconstruction and backtracking. The construction and preliminary tests performed on the DP, carried out using the Carbon ions beam of the CNAO treatment centre using an anthropomorphic phantom as a target, will be reviewed in this contribution.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operate with limited external support and underwater missions usually have long or continuous duration, taking place in dynamic environments, which makes the creation of resilient, fault-tolerant AUVs a necessity. This paper briefly reviews some fault-tolerant techniques and presents the design of a fault-tolerant hardware architecture for AUVs and its application on a bench test prototype. The main fault tolerant techniques applied to the proposed architecture are hardware redundancy, which apply hybrid strategy, and software redundancy, which apply detection, contention, recovery and multiple version.

Headway fluctuations and bus bunching are commonly observed phenomena in transit operations. In this article, we extend the fast traffic flow solver previously proposed for simulating moving bottlenecks to account for transit demand and traffic flows together. The buses are treated as moving bottlenecks in the traffic flow as their dynamics are affected by surrounding traffic, and vice versa. The dynamics of passengers are integrated to reproduce buses operations. Thanks to a semi-analytical approach, we are able to simulate some important aspects of real-life corridors, such as the buses obstructive effect on the surrounding traffic flow, and the environmental traffic effects to the bus bunching phenomenon and passenger waiting time. One can expect that this simulation framework can be employed for transit operation optimization problems where fast and accurate solutions are required.

This paper presents a general obstacle avoidance framework for I-AUV using the Task-Priority kinematic control algorithm. The proposed framework is divided into two modes: (1) Navigation and Inspection and (2) Intervention. For each mode, the algorithm takes into account several key points at the I-AUV and several obstacles. For navigation we fully wrap the I-AUV with a small number of safety spheres, while, for intervention the number of safety spheres used increases, having smaller diameters to allow for more precise motion of the I-AUV near the intervention areas. The framework was implemented and simulated with a 8-DOF I-AUV (GIRONA500) in an Inspection, Maintenance, and Repair (IMR) scenario like those commonly encountered in oil and gas industry. The subsea infrastructure used in the scenario was represented by an Octomap, with each occupied cell being considered an obstacle. The I-AUV performed a mission, inspecting the infrastructure in Inspection Mode and later on, turning a valve in Intervention Mode, without colliding with the environment and ensuring a safe distance to obstacles at all times.

India is infamously credited to having 37% of its adult population as being illiterate, making it the largest globally. Most of the younger generation cannot afford proper education. This is a very serious concern for a developing country as it hampers the future progress of the land. With the advent of increased internet usage due to cheaper plans, we are developing a bot that's going to act as a tutor of standard education for all age groups and is interactive with its student user and keeps him/her at par with the rest of the people. The bot will be built with the Microsoft Bot Framework using Node.js and will be integrated with the Facebook Messenger. It will be designed to communicate intelligently in English as well as Hindi languages trained using Recast.ai and Dialogflow so as to target the rural along with the urban population.

We propose a design strategy for optimizing antenna positions in linear arrays for far-field Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation of narrow-band sources in collocated MIMO radar. Our methodology allows to consider any spatial constraints and number of antennas, using as optimization function the Weiss- Weinstein bound formulated for an observation model with random target phase and known SNR, over a pre-determined Field-of-View (FoV). Optimized arrays are calculated for the typical case of a 77GHz MIMO radar of 3Tx and 4Rx channels. Simulations demonstrate a performance improvement of the proposed arrays compared to the corresponding uniform and minimum redundancy arrays for a wide regime of SNR values., Comment: 2018 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwaves for Intelligent Mobility (ICMIM)

Modal decomposition is popular in fluid mechanics, especially for data-driven analysis. In particular, dynamic mode decomposition allows to identify the modes that describe complex phenomenona, such as those physically modelled by the Navier-Stokes equation. The identified modes are associated with residuals, which can be used to detect a meaningful change of regime, e.g., the formation of a vortex. Toward this end, moving horizon estimation is applied to identify the trend of the norm of the residuals that result from the application of dynamic mode decomposition to automatically classify the time evolution of fluid flows. The trend dynamics is modelled as a switching nonlinear system and hence a problem of moving horizon estimation is solved to monitor the behavior of the fluid and quickly identify changes of regime. The stability of the resulting estimation error given is proved. The combination of dynamic mode decomposition and moving horizon estimation provides successful results as shown by processing experimental datasets of the velocity field of fluid flows obtained by a particle image velocimetry.

In this paper we propose the use of a dynamic model in which the effects of temperature on friction are considered to develop a virtual force sensor for industrial robot manipulators. The estimation of the inertial parameters and of the friction model are explained. The effectiveness of the virtual force sensor has been proven in a polishing task. In fact, the interaction forces between the robot and the environment has been measured both with the virtual force sensor and a common load cell. Moreover, the advantages provided by considering the temperature dependency are highlighted.

We report the realization and characterization of optofluidic lasers fully embedded in glass chips. By coupling femtosecond micromachining technology for writing the microfluidic circuit with high resolution inkjet technology to fabricate the cavity mirrors, it was possible to get robust Fabry-Perot resonators suitable for low threshold optofluidic lasers. Using as active medium a solution of Rh-6G in ethanol, linewidth as low as 0.5 nm has been obtained with a threshold for oscillation at a pump fluence of 2 μJ/mm2. Different resonant cavities have been tested obtaining record performances for what concern pumping threshold and emission linewidth for Fabry-Perot based optofluidic lasers, achieving a quality factor Q ∼ 103.

With the evolution of Telco systems towards 5G, new requirements emerge for delivering services. Network services are expected to be designed to allow greater flexibility. In order to cope with the new users' requirements, Telcos should rethink their complex and monolithic network architectures into more agile architectures. Adoption of NFV as well as micro-services patterns are opportunities promising such an evolution. However, to gain in flexibility, it is crucial to satisfy structural requirements for the design of VNFs as services. We present in this paper an approach for designing VNF-asa-Service. With this approach, we define design requirements for the service architecture and the service logic of VNFs. As Telcos have adopted IMS as the de facto platform for service delivery in 3G and even 4G systems, it is interesting to study its evolution for 5G towards a microservices-based architecture with an optimal design. Therefore, we consider IMS as a case of study to illustrate the proposed approach. We present new functional entities for IMS-as-a-Service through a functional decomposition of legacy network functions. We have developed and implemented IMS-as-a-Service with respect to the proposed requirements. We consider a service scenario where we focus on authentication and authorization procedures. We evaluate the involved microservices comparing to the state-of-the-art. Finally, we discuss our results and highlight the advantages of our approach.