Abstract

State of the art scientific methods can be used against financial fraud, mainly of a technical nature (computer, economic, mathematical). Although some of the scientific areas involved are not related to technology, such as sociology, it is important that all disciplines provide useful tools to detect fraud. The detection and prevention of financial fraud is a multidisciplinary task, so the solution to this urgent problem needs to be provided by multidisciplinary teams.

Abstract

The call for papers resulted in a high number of submis- sions, from which we have been able to select 12 excellent papers dealing with the different aspects of satellite commu- nications and navigation. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques are attracting a considerable amount of attention from within the terrestrial wireless community. The first paper of this spe- cial issue, “Multisatellite MIMO communications at Ku band and above: investigations on spatial multiplexing for capac- ity improvement and selection diversity for interference mit- igation,” considers the application of such technology over a satellite platform operating in the Ku band and above. The paper considers how MIMO can be used to increase capac- ity by using a satellite spatial multiplexing system and how antenna selection can be used to mitigate interference. The next paper “Investigations in satellite MIMO channel model- ing: accent on polarization” looks at MIMO systems from the polarization diversity point of view and dwells on the satellite cooperative communication concepts. Switch and stay combining (SSC) is a form of diversity technique used in digital receivers to compensate for fade events introduced by the mobile channel. The third paper “Performance analysis of SSC diversity receivers over corre- lated Ricean fading satellite channels” investigates the per- formance of dual-branch SSC receivers for different fading channel characteristics. The next four papers deal with the emerging scenario of mobile digital video broadcasting (DVB-S2 and RCS mo- bile). Alternative approaches to counteracting fading chan- nels introduced when operating in a train environment re- ceiving satellite DVB-S2 are presented in the paper “Ad- vanced fade countermeasures for DVB-S2 systems in railway scenarios.” Here, as a result of simulation analysis, antenna diversity and packet-level forward error correction mecha- nisms are proposed and their impact is evaluated with respect to the receiver design and system complexity. The theme of DVB-S2 is continued with the paper “Capacity versus bit er- ror rate trade-off in the DVB-S2 forward link,” which inves- tigates how satellite capacity can be optimised for DVB-S2 transmissions. The DVB return channel via satellite (DVB- RCS) is then addressed in “Frequency estimation in iterative interference cancellation applied to multibeam satellite sys- tems,” which considers the application of interference cancel- lation on the reverse link of a multibeam satellite system, us- ing DVB-RCS with convolutional coding as an example. The paper “A QoS architecture for DVB-RCS next-generation satellite networks” proceeds to design and emulate a quality- of-service (QoS) architecture that demonstrates using real multimedia applications how QoS can be supported over a DVB-RCS network. 2 EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Synchronization aspects are dealt with in “Maximum likelihood timing and carrier synchronization in burst-mode satellite transmissions.” The paper addresses the problem of achieving synchronisation for a burst-mode satellite trans- mission over an AWGN channel. The subject of burst trans- mission continues with the paper “Burst format design for optimum joint estimation of Doppler-shift and Doppler- rate in packet satellite communications,” which considers optimising the burst-format of packet-oriented transmis- sions by proposing very-low-complexity algorithms for car- rier Doppler-shift and Doppler-rate estimation. A network comprising satellite and high-altitude plat- forms is considered in the paper “TCP-call admission con- trol interaction in multiplatform space architectures.” Cross- layer techniques are implemented by means of TCP feeding back into call admission control (CAC) procedures for the purpose of prevention of congestion and improvement in QoS. Finally, since navigation is an extremely important part of the satellite system family, we have included two papers. The first paper “Efficient delay tracking methods with side- lobes cancellation for BOC-modulated signals” deals with bi- nary offset carrier (BOC) modulation, which is adopted in typical navigation systems. The paper considers how to improve the tracking of the main lobe of the BOC-modulated signal by using sidelobe suppression techniques. An alternative approach based on filter bank processing is presented in “Analysis of filter-bank-based methods for fast serial acqui- sition of BOC-modulated signals” to conclude the special issue. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Traffic jams are a fact of life for many car drivers. Every morning millions of drivers around the world sit motionless in their vehicles for long periods of time as they try to get to work, and then repeat the experience on their journeys home in the evening. The same thing often happens when they are driving to the coast for the weekend or to the airport to go on their holidays. They blame other drivers, increasing volumes of traffic and, inevitably, roadworks. So what has any of this got to do with physics? Document type: Book

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the importance of planning of water supply during the development of a city. The size of a city is limited by the quantity of water that is available to it for residential, commercial, and industrial purposes. A survey in a city of a half-million persons revealed the consumption of about 90 gallons of water per family per day. All water is not alike. There is hard water, soft water, water with different amounts and varieties of mineral content, water that becomes polluted by local activities, and other water characteristics that present the problems that are not easy to solve. When plans are drawn up for the future of a city, the conditions under which water can be dispensed to the citizens must be considered. If reservoirs are to be built, rivers dammed back, or any other physical controls designed, space must be provided and this can easily affect the potential distribution of all manner of institutions including homes, manufacturing plants, recreation grounds, and public buildings.

Abstract

The transportation of hazardous materials by pipeline, road, and rail is presented. The main accident scenarios that can occur in pipelines are commented. A methodology for the assessment of the risk associated with a pipeline is developed through an illustrative case. The associated frequencies and probabilities are given. A risk analysis procedure for road and rail transportation is presented. The main safety and emergency measures are commented. Finally, three real cases are analyzed.

Abstract

More and more interfaces are designed for ‘everybody’, instead of with a specific user-group in mind. In practice, most of them are still used by the ‘typical Internet-user’, the highly educated, white young male with extensive computer and Internet-experience. Amsterdam-based digital city DDS is no exception to this rule. In this article, the interface of DDS is studied with the help of ten first-time users with a more diverse background. Did they face any barriers in using DDS? And what kind of work did they need to perform to use the interface? This study shows that the most serious problems the first-time users faced were not caused by a lack of skill, but by the different technological frame they had. Thus, a script-analysis with the help of ‘outsiders’ seems to be an effective way to uncover some exclusion-processes of a digital city.

Abstract

In recent years, more and increased participation in Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects provides enough data coverage for most places around the world for ordinary mapping and navigation purposes, however, the positional credibility of contributed data becomes more and more important to bring a long-term trust in VGI data. Today, it is hard to draw a definite traditional boundary between the authoritative map producers and the public map consumers and we observe that more and more volunteers are joining crowdsourcing activities for collecting geodata, which might result in higher rates of man-made mistakes in open map projects such as OpenStreetMap. While there are some methods for monitoring the accuracy and consistency of the created data, there is still a lack of advanced systems to automatically discover misplaced objects on the map. One feature type which is contributed daily to OSM is Point of Interest (POI). In order to understand how likely it is that a newly added POI represents a genuine real-world feature scientific means to calculate a probability of such a POI existing at that specific position is needed. This paper reports on a new analytic tool which dives into OSM data and finds co-existence patterns between one specific POI and its surrounding objects such as roads, parks and buildings. The platform uses a distance-based classification technique to find relationships among objects and tries to identify the high-frequency association patterns among each category of objects. Using such method, for each newly added POI, a probabilistic score would be generated, and the low scored POIs can be highlighted for editors for a manual check. The same scoring method can be used for existing registered POIs to check if they are located correctly. For a sample study, this paper reports on the evaluation of 800 pre-registered ATMs in Paris with associated scores to understand how outliers and fake entries could be detected automatically. Document type: Article

Abstract

The introduction and spread of emerging infectious diseases is increasing in both prevalence and scale. Whether naturally, accidentally or maliciously introduced, the substantial uncertainty surrounding the emergence of novel viruses, specifically where they may come from and how they will spread, demands robust and quantifiably validated outbreak control policies that can be implemented in real time. This work presents a novel mathematical modeling framework that integrates both outbreak dynamics and outbreak control into a decision support tool for mitigating infectious disease pandemics that spread through passenger air travel. An ensemble of border control strategies that exploit properties of the air traffic network structure and expected outbreak behavior are proposed. A stochastic metapopulation epidemic model is developed to evaluate and rank the control strategies based on their effectiveness in reducing the spread of outbreaks. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to illustrate the robustness of the proposed control strategies across a range of outbreak scenarios, and a case study is presented for the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. This study highlights the importance of strategically allocating outbreak control resources, and the results can be used to identify the most robust border control policy that can be implemented in the early stages of an outbreak. Document type: Preprint