Developing Core Technologies for Resource-Scarce Nguni Languages

The creation of linguistic resources is crucial to the continued growth of research and development efforts in the field of natural language processing, especially for resource-scarce languages. In this paper, we describe the curation and annotation of corpora and the development of multiple linguistic technologies for four official South African languages, namely isiNdebele, Siswati, isiXhosa, and isiZulu. Development efforts included sourcing parallel data for these languages and annotating each on token, orthographic, morphological, and morphosyntactic levels. These sets were in turn used to create and evaluate three core technologies, viz. a lemmatizer, part-of-speech tagger, morphological analyzer for each of the languages. We report on the quality of these technologies which improve on previously developed rule-based technologies as part of a similar initiative in 2013. These resources are made publicly accessible through a local resource agency with the intention of fostering further development of both resources and technologies that may benefit the NLP industry in South Africa.

Post-selected double teleportation and the modelling of its related non-local properties

Quantum teleportation is a notable basement of quantum processing. It has been experimentally tested with outstanding growing success by introducing improvements and applied advances in the last two decades. Its quantum non-local properties have let to discover and introduce novel implementations based on it in quantum processing, cryptography, quantum resources generation among others. In the current work, we develop a scheme performing double teleportation on two different virtual receivers, while the sender is still able to post-select the final target of teleportation. This process can be then used to generate non-local resources in a coordinated way. Those resources can be transferred to one of the receivers in the form of the non-local resource desired. They are analysed in terms of their parametric behavior, and properties derived from the CHSH inequality.

Phosphorus Governance within Planetary Boundaries: The Potential of Strategic Local Resource Planning in The Hague and Delfland, The Netherlands

In recent years, a growing body of research has explored the urban dimension of the critical resource phosphorus with a focus on urban metabolism analysis, recovery technologies and governance frameworks. However, there has been no tangible and holistic attempt at choosing between available measures and instruments for their implementation in the urban realm. With the growing and increasingly urban world population, cities have become more and more important as actors in phosphorus governance by fueling global phosphorus flows, e.g., via the consumption of food, agricultural products, and phosphorus recycling. Globally, a future-proof phosphorus metabolism may be contributed to by strategic local phosphorus planning. This article systematically explores the purposive potential of local phosphorus planning using a case study of The Hague, The Netherlands. Looking across multiple administrative and spatial dimensions, the study combines quantitative analysis of phosphorus flows with qualitative investigation of their drivers, the actors involved, current regulations and local scope for action. The research reveals the feasibility of meaningfully impacting phosphorus flows through urban action. The potential for strategic local resource planning is demonstrated in a grid of policy options and in the assessment of their socio-economic and environmental benefits. Additionally, the study draws up a list of key recommendations to transfer to other urban settings. It encourages further research aimed at closing data gaps for local phosphorus inventories, collaborative approaches in strategic resource planning, scope for action in other cities or jurisdictions, as well as improved quantification of the outreach of policy effects.

Socioecology and Biodiversity Conservation

The discipline of Socioecological Systems (SES) was conceptualized in 1998 with the intention of understanding the effects of human activities on natural ecosystems by analyzing resilience in local resource management systems [...]

Demystifying the Placement Policies of the NVIDIA GPU Thread Block Scheduler for Concurrent Kernels

In this work, we empirically derive the scheduler's behavior under concurrent workloads for NVIDIA's Pascal, Volta, and Turing microarchitectures. In contrast to past studies that suggest the scheduler uses a round-robin policy to assign thread blocks to streaming multiprocessors (SMs), we instead find that the scheduler chooses the next SM based on the SM's local resource availability. We show how this scheduling policy can lead to significant, and seemingly counter-intuitive, performance degradation; for example, a decrease of one thread per block resulted in a 3.58X increase in execution time for one kernel in our experiments. We hope that our work will be useful for improving the accuracy of GPU simulators and aid in the development of novel scheduling algorithms.

Bootstrapped Motion of an Agent on an Adaptive Resource Landscape

We theoretically show that isolated agents that locally and symmetrically consume resources and sense positive resource gradients can generate constant motion via bootstrapped resource gradients in the absence of any externally imposed gradients, and we show a realization of this motion using robots. This self-generated agent motion can be coupled with neighboring agents to act as a spontaneously broken symmetry seed for emergent collective dynamics. We also show that in a sufficiently weak externally imposed gradient, it is possible for an agent to move against an external resource gradient due to the local resource depression on the landscape created by an agent. This counter-intuitive boot-strapped motion against an external gradient is demonstrated with a simple robot system on an light-emitting diode (LED) light-board.